Gideon Writes

Darwin taught us that everything in our being is a product of evolution, driven by the power of survival. Therefore any part of us can be explained as having evolved in order to enhance our chance to survive. It explains our running feet, our dexterous fingers, our pumping heart, our thinking brain. Alas, there is no detectable survival impact due to consciousness. A consciousness free brain with good memory, good thinking skills and good focus is what evolution would carve out for our intellectual capacity; a set of instincts to boot, may be. But why a sense of self, why consciousness?

So either its role is yet to be discerned, or it has come to be by another process, apart from the evolution production line.

Our ancestors would call it God. We may use more sterile, more subtle terms, but we mean the same: it’s a mystery, consistent with the Unbound Ignorance.

If it’s only you, or you and a few, who believe one thing or another, while the rest of us think differently then you are under illusion, and being told so. You want to be real, go with the flow. But what about this thing called underlying truth? Well, it’s like earth, there is no up and down relative to space, it is only relative to earth. And yes, in some sense we all swing around heads up, heads down as the sun will see us. But in any practical way we relate to the underlying earth, not the underlying truth.

That underlying truth thing is the saving face mechanism that allows us to stick around with our illusion, countering the ridicule: “You have the crowd, I have truth; you are crude, I am noble!”

And yes, if you stick with your “illusion” until you have enough followers then your illusion becomes reality, and the underlying truth argument shifts to the new crazy minority.

Rational people, scientists, mathematicians, logicians have all danced on the tombstones of ancient religions nullified by Darwinistic evolution — the theory that kicks God out of reality. For some reason it takes much longer for all those who celebrate the triumph of logic and rationality to realize that Darwin had dealt them an equally fatal blow.

Logic in an evolutionary product. It is by chance, according to Darwin, that we evolved to share a sense of comfort with statements like: “If A=B, and B=C, then A=C”. Our civilization has been built on such shared sense of comfort and ‘truth’. Much as ancient societies were built on shared stories of divinity. There is nothing ‘absolute’ in logic, no premise that is hooked and anchored outside our evolutionary built brain. Rigorous mathematicians like Bertrand Russell, and G. H. Hardy have admitted that logical axioms are arbitrary, and are effective because of a shared sense of comfort in their veracity, not because they have any relationship with the truth.

Imagine a student responding to his teacher: “If A=B, and B=C, then clearly A ≠ C. It’s obvious, equality has maxed out, and now A and C cannot be equal. You are trying to trick me, teacher, right?”

Teacher: “Come on, Johnny, it’s not funny, it’s math, I need you to be serious!”

Student: “I am very serious, teacher. Don’t you see that equality is not like a ball that you can pass around, it is a solid connection between two parties, and if A=B, and B=C then to preserve the very notion of this relationship, we must state that A and C are unequal. It’s so obvious to me, teacher, that I don’t see how you can argue otherwise!”

Poor Johnny will end up lingering in the margins of society, feeling dumb and inadequate. Much as gay people used to live. Human society punishes the non-conformist while paying lip service to the contrary. Evolution of bees or people is based on shared convictions. We established a human society because the majority of us, reading this and other axioms (e.g. Euclide’s postulates of geometry) we respond positively, and likewise. Much as we all crave sugar when depleted, and much as we all have a sense of pain when a knife rips through our skin. The agreement zone is where we build our societies. And much as ancient stories about divinity have no foundation to stand on, so it is with our edifice of math, science, and technology.

Do you want truth, turn around, and march Backwards to our embryonic origins. Do you desire a well founded premise to work from? The Unbound Ignorance.

Have you ever wondered why the ancient Israelites have veered off the excellent deal they got from God: “I will give you peace, and prosperity, and all you have to do in return is to smash the altars of the vanquished natives, and put forth prescribed cattle sacrifice for my glory.” Wouldn’t you sign off on that deal? What’s more: the price of cheating is very steep: a total community destruction, a bloody military defeat, a fate of slavery. When you give an electrical shock to a worm when it chooses the wrong path in a fork of the roads, the worm pretty quickly learns to choose right. But for centuries, the Israelites have time and again been lured by the lewd culture of the defeated inhabitants of the land. And every time they so sinned, they paid dearly. Shocked, the Israelites cried to God, begged, got another chance and… veered off again. Strange-

Strange indeed. But it can be explained in light of the philosophy of unbound ignorance. Deep inside we all know that life, as prosperous and as tranquil as it may be — does not make sense. It’s at best a smooth, well oiled journey from birth to departure. Nothing is left, really. So why bother? For the struggling class this unanswered question is too distant, they are busy securing some safety, and earning a few bucks to keep running. But the well to do, who lose interest in glitz as fast as they go through it, the question of meaning, cause, sense, is up and pinching. And if you give your children everything one may desire, but hide from them the truth about our unbound ignorance of life and reality — your kids are likely to behave towards you the way the Israelites took exception to God’s deal. They will experiment with all the restricted stuff you marked as “out of limit”. They will desparatey look for an explanation, a cause, a meaning — in all the wrong places.

So, as a wise parent, share with your children the truth that, we adults, we have not figured it out yet. Life is not explained. We manage to make it easy on you, smooth frictionless; but meaning, cause, sense — that is still up in the air. Perhaps, you, your generation, will take a good stab at it. And there is plenty to search for around you, son, daughter, without having to poison your brain with undue chemicals, or contaminate your character with stupid crowd mania. Use your comfort and wealth to search high and low for what is going on. Better search this wholesomely and cognizantly than sickly and unaware.

Man is surrounded by a wall of vagueness — so it is observed. Crisp and sharp as the here and now are, when moving forth in any direction, vagueness creeps up, persistently, towards a total chaos, and patternless morass. While we do enjoy the sweet fruits of the “Garden of Eden” planted by science and technology, we are also fenced in by its wall of vagueness, ignorant of what is beyond. Most of us turn away from the discomforting thought of being confined, and eagerly embrace the premise that this Garden of Eden is all there is. For a few of us in pursuit of what there is in total, not in part, the virtually hopeless quest is our raison d’etre: the quest to first acknowledge that wall of vagueness, and then to scale it, tear through it, or at first peer across .

Are you one of these few? Drop me a note!

Europeans have uprooted the Jews from their homeland, and marched them as slaves and as refugees in their victory parades. And for the past 2000 years Europeans have on one hand allowed them to re-sprout, while on the other hand they have violated, ill-treated, and exploited them through the centuries. E.g.: The European church has up- fronted Jews to lend money with high interest, against its own teaching — casting the Jew as the hated debt collector throughout the continent. It all came to a horrible crescendo seventy years ago as Europe exhibited its impressive technological and organizational capabilities through the most effective genocide act of all times. When Americans and Russians put a stop to it, the Jews that were standing in line to be annihilated have crawled their way out of Europe to their old homeland where Europeans have violated them to begin with.

By all accounts budding Israel is an inspiring story of hope and can-do. The sons and daughters of the Europe-violated Jews are now producing innovative products sold throughout the continent of Europe. A strip of sand north of Jaffa has become the bustling city that never ends: Tel Aviv.

And all that exemplary growth takes place against a massive stubborn, hateful campaign seeking to finish off the unfinished European program of annihilation — spearheaded by Israel intimate neighbors, the Palestinians, where peace-lovers and committed haters are thoroughly mixed. Israel is profoundly and passionately eager for peace, and disarmament — negotiating and defending as circumstances dictate. Given the European role in Jewish suffering for the last two thousand years, it’s Europe moral call to put its considerable weight in favor of a thriving Jewish state: Israel.

Standing by Israel means respecting its own assessment of just terms, of acceptable risk, or proper borders. A moral European politician who thinks that Israel errs, and should have a different position on matters of peace and borders, should so advice Israel, and do so under the conviction that his or her opinion may not be flawless either. Europe does not have to automatically agree with Israel on every point, and a friendly debate should ensue. However, when Europe flexes its muscles, threatens, boycotts, sanctions and denies access to Israelis whom they consider ‘occupiers’, then Europe is practicing a grave historical immorality. Europe cannot undo the Holocaust, it cannot run away from its record of cheering the Nazis for their Final Solution, but Europe must be righteous and brave, and acknowledge its moral debt to the Jew that begged refuge, to the Jew who so richly contributed to the culture of the continent. This moral obligation should be expressed through support of the Jewish quest for peace, security, and prosperity.

Europe: own up to your historic obligation to Jewish suffering — help out, don’t quash! open up — don’t cut off, debate — don’t dictate!

Europe has tremendous credit in the story of humanity — to exercise it, Europe should don the robe of morality. Acknowledging its debt to Jewry is a place to start!

In blasting front page headlines, the Wall Street Journal today (March 24, 2014) exposes the alarming state of blindness towards Russia, China and other protagonists in our unending cyber-war. It’s not as easy as eyeing Aunt Rosy’s Facebook page and stealing her phonelog. The Russians are masters, they use well simple robust tools that we are too lazy, to sophisticated to appreciate.  In stealing the secret of the Atom Stalin spies used “One Time Pad” encryption, invented in the US, and ignored by the US, because it’s too tedious to apply. Alas, until today we can’t crack the Russian communications from that era because “One Time Pad” tedious and all, is uncrackable, as Claude Shannon has brilliantly proved.  Similarly, they deny the US any intelligence regarding the intensity of communication. Normally one would expect to pick up preparations for a military operation like recently in Crimea but none was picked.  The Russians mask the intensity of their communication by maintaining a fixed intensity of bit flow. If they say nothing, all these bits a noise, random, meaningless. If they do say anything it is embedded in the random flow, but does not change the bit rate so we are not the wiser. “It’s too hard to use” was the response that we got when we offered a similar protection here.  One fears that a massive amount of mishaps lay unexposed behind all those curtains of secrecy. When cyber war failings come to the surface like today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal — the real scope of the problem deserves more attention than a short lived blog posting.

• As long as we lack a cyber security theory, “Target”, “Heartland”, and worse will keep coming

Bridges kept falling until Newton formulated his mechanics: the underlying principles that keep high rises standing, ships sailing, and rockets flying. None of these could have happened without Newton’s abstraction of the myriad of observations regarding the dynamics of material things.  Maxwell did the same to give us television, radio, cell phone and everything electronic.  And what is needed — urgently — is a “Cyber Newton”, a “Security-Maxwell”: a sound and effective theoretical foundation for the challenge of security in cyber space.

Patch work, our present strategy, is woefully inadequate. All those extensive malware logs never stop the next flavor.  There are several thousands distinct credible attack pathways pointing into the heart of every, so called, secure system. It is theoretically impossible  for the security team to identify each and every such attack pathway. The hackers, on their part, have all those multitude of attack options available to them, and all they have to do is to spot one attack scenario that was missed by the security team. One is enough!   I have not personally analyzed the Target situation but reportedly that is what happened. I have done some work on the Heartland breach, and there, I know, that it was a case of the hackers spotting a way to compromise the system, a way which the security team missed, as they missed many other attack scenarios, as anyone else would have missed so many effective ways to inflicting data-harm.

Tactics, Specificity, and patching holes after the fact, do not work. Imagine that we would have built bridges by simply not repeating a design of a bridge that fell in the past.  The more bridges we would have spun, the more would have fallen, and we would have logged an ever longer list of ‘what not to do’ which is of little help. Luckily our design is guided by the first principles formulated by Newton.

Similarly in security, huge logs of known signatures of bad code, and long lists of lessons as to ‘what not to do’ is the wrong, wrong strategy.

Another analogy: every chess player looking at a board, will quickly appraise whose position is stronger. Have they identified all possible game sequences?  No, even IBM Deep Blue can’t do that.  The strength of a position of a chess board is abstracted from the details.  Grand masters abstract better than the rest of us.

And that is what we need for cyber security: first principles to abstract the threat.  Everything that we do in security is driven and justified by the threat. The less we understand the threat, the weaker our defense. Most security consultants rush to build walls, deploy intrusion detectors, set up burdensome identity verifiers, but they rarely stop to seriously analyze the threat, estimate, appraise, quantify it. And that  is because we don’t have the tools, we don’t have a cyber security theory.

It is beyond ‘Target’, it is further than payment; as we move in to our new world, the cyber world, the need for sound security is growing. It is our civil order that we are talking about here; it is our national defense that is in play.  We mouth a lot about the asymmetric war, where we have a disproportionate vulnerability amplified by our total lack of theory.

Here and there someone is raising this issue, mostly in pure academic terms, it is not enough, it is pathetic really, in light of our growing vulnerability.  It starts with leadership. Reading Einstein’s letter on the threat of unprecedented proportions, President Roosevelt, handed Einstein’s warning of the Atomic bomb over to his secretary of War stating clearly: “This Needs Action!”

We need a Presidential level summon of a Cyber-Oppenheimer, charging him with  putting together a Cyber-Manhattan Project, and turning the table on the barbarians at our cyber gates.

Any delay will be judged by history as dereliction of duty.

Bitcoin money is not associated with any particular human owner.  Money is owned by a sequence of bits known as a ‘public key’.  And guess what: it’s all in the public domain. Everybody can see who are the rich public keys. And if you just invested in a powerful mining computer to mine bitcoins, you may be well tempted to use all this mining power, to mine the corresponding private key of a rich public key.  Why sweat to mine a few miserable bitcoins, if you can, at once, own millions — safely.  The ‘rightful’ owner of the money cannot come after you because (i) he or she cannot prove that they are the ‘rightful’ owner of the money. The money is ‘owned’ by the specific public key, or to say, owned by whomever is in possession of the corresponding private key. If your trusted friend, or spouse steals your private key, the police will not help you. You bought yourself anonymity all right, but you purchased it with rotten security.  No big deal, if you invest your play money in Bitcoin, but if your entire retirement fund is there, it is not so funny…