Cyber Wuh?

Dan McGarry

I’ve argued in the past that the centralisation of network hardware is a liability not only to civil defense but to personal liberty. It’s gratifying to see someone else make the case so well. If you want to understand the current dynamic between an open Internet that enables unparalleled social forces and a network infrastructure that allows vastly increased levels of surveillance, censorship and control, you have to read Hersh on the matter. He’s not the last word in the discussion, but his contribution is indispensable.

Seymour Hersh is a better, more generous man than I. He does a characteristically sober and thorough job of investigating purported threats to military and civilian communications networks in the latest edition of the New Yorker magazine. I might like him better if he had avoided using the words ‘Cyber’, ‘War’ and ‘Terror’ all in a single headline, but in fairness, sometimes to you have to use the language to negate its power.

I would also have preferred it had he not given such prominence to Richard Clarke’s fear-mongering, indulging him with a lengthy quote describing a catastrophic cyber war scenario with nationwide power cuts and planes ‘literally falling out of the sky'[*]. It takes him several more paragraphs to debunk Clarke’s ramblings as self-promoting opportunism, and he does so with trademark aplomb – describing in some detail the economic interests at stake in this discussion and drawing a compelling portrait of the desire for control that motivates many of the characters in the world of online security.

A more cynical writer might jam a refutation up front in order not to leave impatient readers with the mistaken impression that he might somehow be endorsing these views. Hersh, it seems, trusts his readers to work through 6000 words of calm analysis; and, damn him, his trust in me at least is never misplaced.

Alas, he suffers fools far more gladly than I. His style is one which provides all involved with more than enough rope. I suspect that this equality of opportunity is what allows him to maintain access to extremely privileged sources in defense circles.

But what makes Seymour Hersh so valuable as a reporter on the military is his ability to cut through the fog of war-talk, to make clear distinctions between the actual threats and their portrayal in popular dialogue. In this particular case, he renders the world a service by drawing a clear line between electronic espionage (a commonplace activity in which the intrusions come more often from Western allies then from enemies) and actual Cyber War. He lines up a number of analysts who cogently and calmly dispel the latter as largely a fabrication used to drum up support (and budget) for increased military influence in civilian communications networks.

Most infuriatingly, he does so without down-playing the truly disturbing lack of protections against attack that characterise much of our modern communications infrastructure.

His dry-eyed depiction of NSA Director and newly-minted commander of the US military’s Cyber War command Gen. Keith Alexander is a truly magisterial piece of work. Without once voicing a word of criticism, he lays out a portrait of a man who wants, effectively, to dismantle the open, distributed (and yes, sometimes even anarchic) Internet and replace it with the digital equivalent of the Maginot Line.

There exists an innate tendency among all people with any influence to say, “Wait, this Internet thing is completely out of our control. We need to do something!” While the first sentence may be true, they neglect the simpler conclusion: If the network can’t be controlled from any single point, it can’t easily be destroyed by a single, targeted attack.

… Which is exactly what the Internet was invented to prevent.

I’ve argued in the past that the centralisation of network hardware is a liability not only to civil defense but to personal liberty. It’s gratifying to see someone else make the case so well. If you want to understand the current dynamic between an open Internet that enables unparalleled social forces and a network infrastructure that allows vastly increased levels of surveillance, censorship and control, you have to read Hersh on the matter. He’s not the last word in the discussion, but his contribution is indispensable.

[*] Clarke’s words, of course. It’s those literal falls you have to worry about. The figurative ones aren’t nearly as dangerous.

Letter to a Young Turk

Dan McGarry

Grow up, kid. Brace yourself. We’re living in one of the best, most prosperous times in human history, yet humanity is still the venal, nasty, selfish brute that wandered the veldt millions of years ago. Enjoy the miracle of our success, then devote some time to understanding in detail what it is that keeps us from wiping ourselves off the face of the planet.

… And welcome to the world. You’re going to love it, even if it doesn’t always love you.

On hearing the news that the government of the UK was proposing to track every single phone call, email and website visit for all of its citizens, someone posted the following to a forum I frequent:

This really reads like something out of fiction. I did not think I’d see the day of such a government, but here I am at 22 years old and already, a modern, 1st world country is to the point where it feels the need and justification to monitor every action of it’s populace. The precedent here is staggering, terrifying and morally bankrupt.

There are only two things new about this:

  1. The technology used to perform the surveillance; and
  2. The fact that the government is even asking Parliament for permission.

Son, if you live long enough, you’ll see ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ nations perform a lot of acts that will make you ashamed, that will make you fear for the future. In my lifetime, I’ve seen Nixon bomb Cambodia, the Reverend Martin Luther King shot down in cold blood, along with Medgar Evers, Bobbie & John Kennedy and a bunch of others; I’ve seen students shot dead merely for expressing their opinion. I’ve seen government admit to selling drugs in order to finance guerrilla operations to subvert a foreign, democratically elected government. I’ve seen governments sell anti-tank missiles to their enemies.

I’ve seen enough appalling and apparently senseless miscarriages of justice to understand that human society –that chimera we call civilisation– is a fragile, ephemeral thing.

Danger lies on both sides of a very narrow path. Oh it’s all well and good to check the safety on your handgun and make noises about getting ourselves a new government, but when it comes right down to it, mythology notwithstanding, violence almost always begets more violence. Once that cycle starts, the one most willing to keep shooting is most likely to be the last one standing.

On the other side lies complacency and a willingness to buy a stake in the game. This may be inconceivable to you now, but the people who screamed loudest for deregulation of the finance system, for off-shoring labour and for vengeance after 9/11 were the very same ones placing daisies into the muzzles of M-16s just few decades ago. People change; they learn to acquiesce. They just want to be secure. They’d rather join a party than a cause.

The only thing holding things together is common decency, and even that is failing –at least in the US. When it’s no longer possible to object in civil tones, when disagreement is more about affiliation than information, when dissent and disenchantment are met not only with disapproval but disenfranchisement… it becomes harder and harder to keep the ship of state on an even keel.

The answer? Read your Thoreau. Understand the tactics that Gandhi and King used. Their tactics were not about Peace, Love and Bobby Sherman; they were dry-eyed assessments of the most effective way to move policy when violent rebellion seemed to be the only option –and a losing option, at that.

Grow up, kid. Brace yourself. We’re living in one of the best, most prosperous times in human history, yet humanity is still the venal, nasty, selfish brute that wandered the veldt millions of years ago. Enjoy the miracle of our success, then devote some time to understanding in detail what it is that keeps us from wiping ourselves off the face of the planet.

… And welcome to the world. You’re going to love it, even if it doesn’t always love you.

Doctor Me? Doctor You!

Dan McGarry

The BBC should sponsor a fanvid contest, in which the most implausible people play the Doctor. In the interests of actually being able to finish in a reasonable amount of time, contestants should create only the pre-credit opening scene.

I have a contest idea:

Given that:

  1. Doctor Who is wildly popular;
  2. Following each regeneration, the Doctor can end up looking like anyone;
  3. He can appear at any point in space and time;

The BBC should sponsor a ‘Doctor You’ fanvid contest, in which the most implausibly plausible people play the Doctor. In the interests of actually being able to finish in a reasonable amount of time, contestants should create only the pre-credit opening scene.

This whole idea is inspired by the realisation that Matt Smith looks TOO MUCH like the Doctor. He’s not entirely credible because he’s too plausible.

See, David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston are really not unusual-looking. Their only visible eccentricity is in their clothing, and even that isn’t something that would leap out if they walked past you on the High Street.

And that’s why we experience delight when we see, for example, Tennant yelling, ‘Allons-y!’ and leaping out of a spaceship in a suicidal suborbital descent, down through a Victorian skylight, just in time to send the Time Lords back into oblivion.

One look at Matt Smith’s features, though, and we’re more inclined to say, ‘Oh well, he would do that, wouldn’t he?’ Worse, we’re left slightly mystified when he demonstrates normal human emotions, which is a good deal of the time.

So let’s play with the assumption that Doctor could look like anybody. That there’s really no reason he wasn’t more than slightly Sheldon Cooper-esque back when he was in his 200s. That he might be a corpulent middle-aged middle-brow more likely to yell ‘Trot!’ than ‘Run!’.

None of these details really matter. Not nearly so much as the fact that this is a (mostly) human character wandering alone in the Cosmos with the fate of civilizations resting on his –or her– shoulders. That’s character enough, don’t you think?

Anyway, everyone should make an entry. Here’s mine….

Read more “Doctor Me? Doctor You!”

Next Generation Internet in the Pacific

Dan McGarry

The Internet helps make old things new again. It provides a new and powerful way to ensure that the bonds of family and society continue to tie everyone in Vanuatu together. At this year’s PacINET conference, we saw yet again how strong communities make society healthier and more able to develop itself.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

PM Edward Natapei Nipake addresses the PacINET 2010 conferenceVanuatu welcomed over 140 attendees from Vanuatu and throughout the Asia-Pacific region this week to the annual PacINET technology conference. It was organised by the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society (PICISOC) and by the Vanuatu IT Users Society (VITUS).

At Wednesday’s opening ceremony, Prime Minister Edward Nipake Natapei highlighted Vanuatu’s leadership role in driving technological development in the country.

“The effects,” he said, “have been revolutionary. As a result of our telecommunications policies, economic activity has increased, adding an additional 1% to GDP growth at a time when the world economy was shrinking. Studies show that social bonds are strengthened, too, making families safer and stronger in a time of increased mobility and migration.”

The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Next Generation Internet: Security and Governance’. Among the highlights were deployment through the Pacific region of a new Internet protocol that will allow Internet-based businesses and organisations to continue to grow, a day-long investigation of the One Laptop Per Child project and another all-day workshop aimed at school principals – key stakeholders in ICT for development in Vanuatu.

Backing all these efforts is something people in Vanuatu understand better than most in the world – a thriving Pacific ICT community willing to share knowledge, experience and insight to make life better, not just for IT geeks, but for everyone.

Without the efforts of a devoted band of volunteers, the success of information and communications technologies (ICT) as tools for development would be severely limited. While the developed world has benefited significantly from entrepreneurialism and business development to drive technological advancement, the soul of the Pacific lies in the sense of community service that we all share.

Our resources are limited, we rely (some say too much) on donor aid for most improvements in our day-to-day lives, and though market players such as TVL have a tremendously influential role to play, their success is largely contingent on the willingness and capacity of the community to take advantage of their products and services.

Indeed, one the defining characteristics of these commercial operations is their close ties to the local community. Every day we saw TVL staffers contributing time and attention to ensuring the conference ran smoothly. Many attendees commended the quality and performance of the WiMax broadband link donated by TVL, one of the largest deployed to date in Vanuatu. The consensus is that it was every bit as good as they’d seen in conferences in Australia or New Zealand.

But all the Internet bandwidth in the world won’t help us if we don’t make the most of what we have. It was for this reason that conference organisers decided to concentrate on the next generation of Internet technologies. All week long, IT professionals focused on the deployment of a new kind of addressing system for the Internet.

Called IPv6, this protocol will allow the Internet to continue to grow in the years to come. Just as every mobile phone needs its own number, every computer connected to the Internet requires a unique address in order for others to be able to talk to it. The first allocation of about 4 billion numbers is about to run out, and unless action is taken, this will severely limit the growth of the Internet in the Asia-Pacific region.

Once we’ve assured that everyone can get an address, the next task is to help people find a way to make use of those addresses. That’s why PacINET 2010 organisers helped arrange a meeting between Michael Hutak, Oceania director of the One Laptop Per Child project and the Prime Minister. PM Natapei showed his continuing commitment to the development of a comprehensive ICT policy, promising his support for a year long trial of up to 2000 of these robust, low-cost and low-power devices in Vanuatu’s outer islands.

Following the meeting, Hutak was quick to point out that one cannot simply parachute laptops into a community and expect everything to work swimmingly. “Follow up,” said Hutak, “is crucial.”

He was preaching to the choir. Led by volunteer George Tasso with significant support from the Department of Education, VITUS members organised a full-day event for school principals aimed at informing them of the perils and profits involved in ICT deployment in schools.

Tasso and others have been working for over a year now with local IT volunteers, pairing them up with schools in Port Vila and organising high-level support and assistance from more experienced VITUS members. The result is that young volunteers not only get the opportunity to learn from more experienced colleagues, but schools benefit from no-cost, on-site technical support.

This week’s workshop featured the announcement of a partnership between Edwards Computer Foundation and Vanuatu schools in which IT graduates will be paired with a mentor from within the VITUS community and given the opportunity to spend time in a post-graduation work-study programme in community schools.

The Internet helps make old things new again. It provides a new and powerful way to ensure that the bonds of family and society continue to tie everyone in Vanuatu together. At this year’s PacINET conference, we saw yet again how strong communities make society healthier and more able to develop itself.

Cautionary Note

Dan McGarry

Every now and then, someone stumbles across my blog and asks me how they, too, can work in development. I try to be supportive, but usually find myself actively discouraging them, at least at first.

You’d better be strong, flexible, resourceful, good with languages and have more than the normal allotment of patience.

I’ve been stuck in cyclones, got malaria, dengue, been hospitalised from the after-effects of prolonged dehydration, had more parasites in more places than anyone really wants to know. I’ve been stung by things straight out of a Tim Burton movie. I’ve had death threats and constant, insanely unreasonable demands on my time and my pocketbook.

To put things into perspective: we had a 7.5 earthquake here a couple of weeks ago, and were laughing about it within the hour. Nature is tough and unforgiving here. You’d better be prepared.

You may think all this is exciting. It’s emphatically not. Put your Hollywood imagination away. It’s tedious, uncomfortable and often dangerous in small, boring, trivial ways.

I walked away from an affluent existence as one of the first few professional web developers to enter the field and survive now on a small fraction of what I used to earn (although I do live quite well by local standards – my new house has hot water!). That may sound romantic – I’ll admit it does to me – but the price is no security in my old age. I’m fool enough not to worry, but you may not be so inclined.

Development is a dirty, arduous grind, with few noteworthy victories. You have to measure success like a batting average. Just assume you’ll strike out more than you succeed. Most projects are unwinnable from the start, and you only go through with them because to do nothing would be worse.

On top of all of that, you’ll need to adjust to a culture so foreign to your experience that it will often leave you bemused or even shocked to the core. And you won’t have any safety net to rely on. There won’t be any police if you’re in a tight spot (unless they’re the ones who put you in it), the fire truck – if it arrives at all – will come in time to water down the ashes.

You’ll see children crippled and even killed by trivially treatable conditions. You’ll see good people die and bad people prosper.

But once in a while, someone will smile at you like this, and it will all be worthwhile….

… It better be, anyway, because most of the time, that’s all the payment you get.

If, after all that, you’re still intent on coming, then read this and come on along.

You Are All Driving Pintos And I Want You To Stop

Dan McGarry

I’ve lived with it for a while now, but really, it’s getting intolerable. The vast majority of you are using the computer equivalent of a Ford Pinto. Poorly built, underpowered and yet inefficient, lacking both in style and substance. And unsafe at any speed.

Worse still, you’re not even driving it.

Back in 2007, Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet, stood up at the Davos Forum and announced that, out of about 600 million personal computers worldwide, about 150 million are remotely controlled by criminals. These ‘zombies’ or ‘bots’ as they’re commonly known, are formed into legions of compromised machines called ‘botnets’.

Let’s put this in perspective: If your own PC is not infected, then odds are very high that one of your immediate neighbours is. When you factor in the strict security and controls that many enterprises maintain on their corporate resources, the odds that your home PC (and your neighbour’s) is a bot increase significantly.

I have a bone to pick with you.

I’ve lived with this for a while now, but really, it’s getting intolerable. The vast majority of you are using the computer equivalent of a Ford Pinto. Poorly built, underpowered and yet inefficient, lacking both in style and substance. And unsafe at any speed.

You really need to ask why?Worse still, you’re not even driving it.

Back in 2007, Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet, stood up at the Davos Forum and announced that, out of about 600 million personal computers worldwide, about 150 million are remotely controlled by criminals. These ‘zombies’ or ‘bots’, as they’re commonly known, are formed into legions of compromised machines called ‘botnets’.

Let’s put this in perspective: If your own PC is not infected, then odds are very high that one of your next-door neighbours’ is. When you factor in the strict security and controls that many enterprises maintain on their corporate resources, the odds that your home PC (and your neighbour’s) is a bot increase significantly.

Next time you’re having a coffee and using the wifi service, take a look around. Count the number of non-Mac laptops. Divide by 4. That’s how many computers are trying to infect you on the very network you’re using to buy stuff. You wouldn’t jump into a hot tub with a bunch of strangers even at better odds than that. Why do it with your laptop?

The Pinto is notorious for actually blowing up if you bumped into it in a certain way. Botnets currently aren’t doing as much damage as that. They could, but they don’t. Simply put, their controllers would rather use them than lose them. They are quite happy to pollute the Internet with spam, viruses and other nasties, but they’d much rather steal your credit card number than your Internet access.

To switch analogies, it’s like some dark overlord deciding to postpone the zombie Apocalypse, using his legions to pick pockets and snatch purses instead.

Why am I so upset? Why should I care if most people cruise the Internet in the equivalent of a polluting, gas-guzzling, style-less lemon? Because you’re not only destroying my view, you’re damaging the road itself.

According to a recent report, 40% of the world’s spam is being generated by a single botnet. The botnet, named Rustock, comprises approximately 1.3 million individual PCs. This one botnet, in other words, has enlisted the services of almost the same number of people as there are in the US Military. Their combined efforts result in about 46 billion spam messages a day.

46 billion-with-a-B spam messages. Every day. From one botnet alone.

Take a look at this graph. See those peaks and valleys? Notice how they match perfectly the pattern of people turning on their computers in the morning and off again later at night? See the lull over the weekend? This graph tracks spam activity over the course of a normal week on just one spam trap operated by some people who run an anti-spam operation.

They say:

The Y [vertical] axis is emails per second. “5.0k” means 5000 emails/second. For each 1000 emails/second this trap averages over a day, the total is another 86 million emails/day. For example, a 5000 emails/second average over a day represents 432 million emails per day.

Botnets are used for other nefarious purposes, but spam is the most noticeable. The Rustock botnet mentioned above sends mostly pharmaceutical spam, offering to sell dangerous, controlled substances, among other things.

But even if they were flooding the Net with messages of love and hope, botnets would still be a menace. Imagine if every time you drove on the freeway, 1 in 4 fellow commuters’ vehicle would blow a gasket, slow down to a fraction of the speed limit, start making an infernal noise and spew smoke so thick that you had no choice but to slow down to a crawl.

That’s what’s happening, but you can’t see it. The computer industry has responded to this threat by selling the moral equivalent of frosted windows. Email providers have become so good at hiding spam that only a tiny fraction of it ever appears in your mail box. So, I can hear you say, where’s the problem, then? Spam created; spam deleted. Problem solved.

Not quite. That spam chews up a tremendous amount of bandwidth and processor time. Bandwidth you pay for. Don’t imagine that your ISP is going to say, “Oh, that’s just spam, our beloved customer didn’t actually mean to send that message 14,000 times. Let’s not charge him for those megabytes.”

Billions of dollars are spent on software and hardware to treat the symptom without once addressing the cure. Your PC runs slower and costs more because of the antivirus that comes installed on it. And even that isn’t nearly adequate to protect you.

To be clear: The Pinto in this picture is the Windows XP operating system. I’m going to apply some precise technical terminology here, so pay close attention:

Windows XP Security Sucks The Hind Teat of a Scrofulous Cow.

Some argue that once there are as many Macs (or Linux machines, or iPads, or Android phones) on the market, they’ll be just as beset by malicious software as Windows. Theoretically, that’s possible. In the real world, however, the opposite is true.

In the realm of computer servers, Linux-based operating systems are taking a dominant position. Yet when it comes to the number of servers compromised by malicious software, they represent a vanishingly small fraction of the cases.

Despite the recent proliferation of Macs, linux-based netbooks, tablets and smart phones, none has yet to show any significant signs of affliction. That’s not to say it won’t happen, but it hasn’t yet.

Do yourself a favour. Do us all a favour. Stop using Windows. Buy a Mac. Try Linux. Do something, anything, but stop polluting the view and the digital motorway with your second-rate death trap of a clunker.

Seriously: stop.

If you absolutely must use the Pinto OS, the least you could do is get the latest version. Windows 7, while still flawed in oh-so-many ways, is nonetheless a vast improvement over XP.

Do something, please. Anything is better than what you’re doing now.

An American Dreamer

Dan McGarry

The world is not gentle to the innocent, but no matter how it battered him, Tim Drefahl never let it win. Vanuatu offered solace for a while and, on an island ringed by an azure lagoon, there are people who will never forget his duty, his devotion, his love.

He swung and missed at every ball, and never blamed the bat. And every time he stepped up, he believed – he believed this time was different.

Tim at the base of Mount Yasur

Vanuatu seemed made for Tim Drefahl, and he for it. He wasn’t the typical Peace Corps volunteer. Older than most, much younger than the rest, he struggled to find his place in the fraternity. Perhaps it was his outsider status that made him a true friend for some of us and a devoted, caring member of his adoptive family in the Maskelyne islands.

In his first real foray outside the confines of Reaganite California, Tim found himself bewildered by the sarcasm and piss-taking of his newfound expat mates. He struggled and, as he always did, adjusted. By his second year here, he was leaning into the banter, trying gamely to give as good as he got.

No such struggle was required in his integration with ni-Vanuatu society, not at first. His love for the people of the Maskelynes and his devotion to their development gave focus to his unquenchable determination. An American Dreamer to the last, he KNEW that, with a liberal application of sweat and willpower, anything could be achieved. No matter what the world threw at him, no matter how he struggled to find his stance, this was one lesson he never un-learned.

Tim could be thick, occasionally breath-takingly wrong. He was awkward, often comically lacking in timing and sense. But he was true. Few people can be said to be genuinely pure of heart, but this man was one. And the world, with its piercing subtleties and sharpened edges, made sure that he paid more for every lesson.

Tim never learned caution and never lost hope. He stumbled into success and failure with equal resolve and unending faith in the rightness of his cause. It was his misguided clarity, ultimately, that closed Vanuatu’s door to him. Contracted to work in the administration of donor funds on a project close to his heart, he butted heads continually with departmental staff. No battle was too small. Right was right and wrong was wrong and that was it.

He was too Good. He succeeded too well. His project stayed on track, more or less, but winning so bluntly guaranteed that he would not work here again.

His exile from Vanuatu was purest misery. Alone and nearly friendless, he kept himself going through a year teaching English in Korea with the promise of return. But an extended vacation was the most he could muster. The world, as usual, exacted its price. The realisation that he could not make this his home nearly broke him.

He never stopped fighting, though; we knew he wouldn’t. Back to the US, then to Seoul for a time, just long enough to find a new passion: The city of Osaka, Japan. A clownish barbarian at the gates, he threw himself into this new exploration with blind enthusiasm. Appropriating friends like a pinball gaining points, he bounced and stumbled and clutched his way toward work, a home, a place of his own.

But the world does not reward the quixotic. Courage untempered by caution is brittle indeed. The causes are unclear, but on the 22nd of June, Tim was admitted to hospital with severe head injuries. He lingered for a few weeks, and on July 13th, 2010 he died.

“I miss you,” wrote one of his newfound Japanese friends, “I’m very sorry that I couldn’t save you even though I was near you.”

There are many in Vanuatu who feel the same.

The world is not gentle to the innocent, but no matter how it battered him, Tim Drefahl never let it win. Vanuatu offered solace for a while and, on an island ringed by an azure lagoon, there are people who will never forget his duty, his devotion, his love.

Snippets

Dan McGarry

On the bus ride back to the office today, I eavesdropped (as I often do) to a couple of women speaking one of Vanuatu’s hundreds of local languages. While I can speak exactly none of them, I know dribs and drabs of about a dozen or so, and it serves as a pleasant game to try to figure out whence the interlocutors originate.

On the bus ride back to the office today, I eavesdropped (as I often do) to a couple of women speaking one of Vanuatu’s hundreds of local languages. While I can speak exactly none of them, I know dribs and drabs of about a dozen or so, and it serves as a pleasant game to try to figure out whence the  interlocutors originate.

The women shifted between Bislama and language as required, using the former to fill in any gaps that a pre-modern, agrarian vocabulary might expose when discussing life in town. The dialogue, to these ignorant ears, went something like this:

“Language language language language language mobile language language language text language language language credit language language language westem mani nomo!”

It didn’t surprise me that ‘mobile’, ‘credit’ or ‘text’ required substitution. But it is telling indeed that this language had no word for ‘money’ and, even more interesting, ‘waste.’

Cheap Shots

Dan McGarry

Aspiring photographer? Trying to make an impression on an online world with your nascent mastery of a century-old craft? Allow me to offer a few words of advice…

Aspiring photographer? Trying to make an impression on an online world with your nascent mastery of a century-old craft? Allow a fellow neophyte to offer a few words of advice.

Not all photographers have the time, opportunity or, heck, the money to take those seriously WTF, how-did-you-DO-that, I-will-see-the-world-differently-because-of-this kind of shot. Sadly, such moments are relatively rare. You may yet have your chance to blow the world away with your incandescent, visionary imagery. But in the mean time, here is a quick primer to help you put your own special genius into perspective.

Shots We Have Already Seen

This may come as a shock, but others have taken photographs before you. Some of them were very talented. Among the shots we have already seen:

  • The water droplet
  • The water droplet on a blade of grass
  • The water droplet on a blade of grass with a distorted reflection of something visible deep inside. (Tragically for you, the visual metaphor of Worlds Within has indeed been considered once or twice before.)
  • The blade of grass, without the water droplet
  • The forced-perspective skyscraper
  • Two forced-perspective skyscrapers
  • Forced-perspective anything, actually
  • The reflection in the window
  • The distorted reflection in the rainy window
  • The staircase (It turns out there are several spiral staircases in the world. They have, alas, all been photographed before. Yes, even that one.)
  • The beggar
  • The self-conscious hipster made edgy and cool by rotating the camera 30 degrees
  • Someone blowing smoke in a dimly lit room (Did you know this happens sometimes in bars? What brave new world is this, indeed.)
  • Footprints (in anything, leading anywhere)
  • Sunset

Shots We Didn’t Want To See In The First Place*

  • Your pet
  • Your girlfriend
  • Your child
  • Your street
  • That old farmhouse
  • Grass
  • That tree (not even at sunset)

* Don’t get we wrong. I’m sure your family and friends would love to see a well-taken shot of any of the above, but unless your date is truly unique, your pet looks like this or you have the skill to capture your child in a moment like this, we’d all rather you didn’t foist them on us for comment. After all, we hardly know you.

Shots Which Had Better Be Really Fucking Good Before You Even Consider Showing Them To Others

See, we don’t mind seeing these. They’re kinda cool. But you might want to think twice before crowing about them. The examples above are just a small sample of the stuff found on one website in about one month.

Things Which Are Never Tasteful, No Matter What

  • Watermarks (Seriously, if someone can’t immediately identify your photos from their own inimitable style, then a watermark isn’t going to help you. And no, cursive text does not make it all right.)
  • Women in bad makeup
  • Women on the railway tracks (I mean, seriously: Dude, what?)
  • Actually, nude women sitting anywhere they wouldn’t normally sit, if you hadn’t paid them*
  • More than two shots of any one thing (Remember: Shake it more than twice and you’re playing with it.)
  • Shots of your camera (especially if you’re holding it.)
  • Models who have been painted all one colour
  • Saturation. It is the photographer’s ketchup. Use it accordingly.
  • The one-colour wash (Guys, seriously, that sepia tone was an artifact of the chemical process required to develop the film. It does not make your model look hotter.)
  • The single colour element of an otherwise monochrome shot. (Shit, even the banks don’t use this in their ads any more; that’s how cliché it’s become.)
  • Captions that say what’s in the model’s thoughts (This goes double when the model is your pet.)
  • Tragically, wedding shots. Don’t know why. They just never are. Ever.

* Okay, on rare occasions, nude women in strange postures are genuinely beautiful. But are they more beautiful than normal postures, really?

Shots We* Actually Do Like To See, Really (Provided You Possess Any Skill At All)

* By ‘we’, of course I mean ‘I’. Shyeah…

Shots That Will Be Popular*, Whether You Do Them Well Or Not

  • Young women
  • Two women touching or nearly touching
  • Children
  • Pets, especially cats
  • Baby animals
  • Children
  • Shiny, especially red and gold

* These are all things we’re wired to stare at, and which can get you far in terms of popularity, until you discover that this hasn’t necessarily made you a better photographer. Then again, they’ve made you popular, so who cares?

Science & Virtue

Dan McGarry

The reason scientists are not believed now is because there is a deliberate campaign in place to discredit them by any means. Because they know most people can’t or won’t read the actual journals, the same cynical geniuses who bald-faced lied about the effects of smoking are teaching a new generation that scientists as a class are motivated by the same venality, mendacity and say-anything-to-get-approval motivations as are the rest of the world.

It’s pretty easy for people to believe this, because we recognise that there’s some of this in all of us. Indeed, it’s trivially easy to find individual examples of greed, jealousy, laziness and other human weaknesses in any field. But it’s a lie, of course, because it’s not true of scientists as a class, and therefore not true of Science. Science, by definition, is the removal of these weaknesses from the pursuit of knowledge.

There’s a new article out from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, which suggests that scientists don’t communicate very well with the public. Among the observations:

“Perhaps scientists are misunderstanding the public…due to their own quirks, assumptions, and patterns of behavior,” suggests [Chris Moody, a science journalist.]  Laypeople, meanwhile, tend to “strain their responses to scientific controversies through their ethical or value systems, as well as through their political or ideological outlooks.”

That’s the crux of the problem right there. What’s changed is not our tendency to filter everything through our own personal strain of moral and ethical judgment. What’s changed is what that moral and ethical fibre is composed of these days: fear, cynical distrust and an assumption of dishonesty.

It’s not communication skills that we’re short on, it’s moral and intellectual honesty.

Read more “Science & Virtue”