Kinder Capitalism

Dan McGarry

This week, Bill Gates made a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling for what he describes as a ‘kinder capitalism’. The Wall Street Journal states that his newfound humanitarianism was born of the awareness that although capitalism has served many in the developing world, it leaves the poorest of the poor behind.

Gates sees capitalism’s worst failings in the areas of technology, health care and education. Billions are invested in each of these sectors, but only a tiny fraction of that investment reaches the two billion poorest members of the population.

His prescription? “We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,” says Gates. He goes on to describe how businesses should task some of their best and brightest with creating products and services targeted at the poorest of the poor.
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The Honeymoon's Begun

Dan McGarry

On Tuesday this week, Parliament agreed to put an end to the telecommunications monopoly in Vanuatu. This news has been greeted with widespread enthusiasm. People throughout Vanuatu believe that this means the days of over-priced, low-quality telephone and Internet services are finally over. But is this really the case?

The answer is mostly yes, with a few important qualifications. It’s almost certain that costs will decrease, service coverage will increase and quality will improve. It’s also quite likely that new kinds of services will be rolled out as well. But many of the environmental factors that constrained telecommunications in the past still remain.

With competition guaranteed. The major telecoms companies are in a beauty contest now. Customers in Vanuatu will shortly find themselves being wooed by players old and new, offering all kinds of exciting services, prices and promotions.

Let’s look into our crystal ball and try to see what things will be like over the next year or so.

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Pushing Pebbles

Dan McGarry

Last week’s column dealt with the frustration one sometimes feels about the slow pace of change here in Vanuatu. Communications and access to information are fundamental to all aspects of life, and the challenges that we face here make the task of achieving universal access to even basic resources a very difficult one indeed.

Telecom Vanuatu, the government and other important stakeholders are all working very hard to implement a new telecommunications strategy. This includes far wider mobile service coverage and a much more open and competitive environment. These first critical steps are to be applauded, of course. We all look forward to the coming improvements in service.

Notwithstanding these significant changes, a great deal remains yet to be done. The good news is that an improved environment will make all the small steps to follow easier, and in some cases, possible for the first time in Vanuatu’s history.

The process of opening up the telecommunications market in Vanuatu has been a long one, and will go on for years to come. It would be instructive to take a look at how all this came about.
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An Immodest Proposal

Dan McGarry1 Comment

When I stop to think about it, the prospect of improving communications here in Vanuatu seems an almost insurmountable problem. At the best of times, it feels like a labour of love. At other times it’s more reminiscent of wading chest deep through a vat of Jell-o.

Everything moves at an infuriatingly slow pace, a pace made worse by a general inclination to stay on the well-trodden path. Now, this desire to stick to so-called safe ground is born of bitter experience. In all aspects of our development, available resources are as tiny as the logistical problem is large. The cost of failure is disproportionately high, too. Mistakes made by headstrong or naive advisors sometimes take us years to recover from.

And yet…. And yet there are times when this risk-averse behaviour comes at a cost higher than failure. One sometimes wishes that our leaders would be just a little bolder, that they would accept that nothing in this world is certain, and that gambling on good odds is sometimes the best alternative. It’s difficult, to say the least, to find a balance between folly and commitment, especially when the political landscape can change at the drop of a hat.
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Ghost in the Machine

Dan McGarry

In the most recent RISKS mailing list digest, Peter Neuman includes a brief article by Adi Shamir describing a method of exploiting minor faults in math logic to break encryption keys in a particular class of processor.

Titled Microprocessor Bugs Can Be Security Disasters, the article makes an interesting argument. In fairly concise terms, Shamir outlines an approach that quickly circumvents much of the hard work in breaking private keys, no matter how heavily encrypted. He uses the RSA key encryption method in his example, probably out of humility. With even my limited knowledge of mathematics, I was able to follow the broad strokes of the approach.

Put most simply, if you know there is a math flaw in a particular kind of processor, then you can exploit that by injecting ‘poisoned’ values into the key decryption process. By watching what happens to that known value, you can infer enough about the key itself that you can, with a little more math, quickly break the private key.

And of course, once you’ve got someone’s private key, you can see anything that it’s been used to encrypt.

This is in some ways a new twist on a very old kind of attack. Code breakers have always exploited mechanical weaknesses in encryption and communications technology. During the Second World War, code breakers in the UK learned to identify morse code transmissions through the radio operator’s ‘hand’ – the particular rhythm and cadence that he used. This sometimes gave them more information than the contents of the communications themselves. Flaws in the Enigma coding machines allowed the Allies to break the device some time before Alan Turing and his early computers got their ‘Bombe’ computer working efficiently:

One mode of attack on the Enigma relied on the fact that the reflector (a patented feature of the Enigma machines) guaranteed that no letter could be enciphered as itself, so an A could not be sent as an A. Another technique counted on common German phrases, such as “Heil Hitler” or “please respond,” which were likely to occur in a given plaintext; a successful guess as to a plaintext was known at Bletchley as a crib. With a probable plaintext fragment and the knowledge that no letter could be enciphered as itself, a corresponding ciphertext fragment could often be identified. This provided a clue to message keys.

These days, computing processors and encryption are used in almost every aspect of our lives. The risks presented by this new class of attack are outlined in fairly plain English by Shamir:

How easy is it to verify that such a single multiplication bug does not exist in a modern microprocessor, when its exact design is kept as a trade secret? There are 2^128 pairs of inputs in a 64×64 bit multiplier, so we cannot try them all in an exhaustive search. Even if we assume that Intel had learned its lesson and meticulously verified the correctness of its multipliers, there are many smaller manufacturers of microprocessors who may be less careful with their design. In addition, the problem is not limited to microprocessors: Many cellular telephones are running RSA or elliptic curve computations on signal processors made by TI and others, FPGA or ASIC devices can embed in their design flawed multipliers from popular libraries of standard cell designs, and many security programs use optimized “bignum packages” written by others without being able to fully verify their correctness. As we have demonstrated in this note, even a single (innocent or intentional) bug in any one of these multipliers can lead to a huge security disaster, which can be secretly exploited in an essentially undetectable way by a sophisticated intelligence organization.

I’m surprised that I haven’t seen much concern voiced about this class of attacks. Maybe I just hang out with an insufficiently paranoid crowd….

The Right Tools for the Job – II

Dan McGarry2 Comments

I was in Pentecost island last week, visiting some members of my extended family in Lalwari, a village located almost in the clouds in the island’s mountainous spine. The village is only accessible by footpath, meaning that day-to-day life is almost entirely without automation of any kind.

Half an hour’s walk down a muddy mountain trail lies Ranwadi School. It recently received nearly a million Australian dollars in upgrades. The school has always been a beacon to PENAMA province’s brightest students. Now, due to strong support, solid administration and high quality resources, Ranwadi is stronger than ever.

I walked down to the school one rainy morning to provide assistance with a computer that had been acting up. A spyware infection had damaged some system files and the machine could no longer start. I spent about an hour re-installing the operating system software on the machine, and everything was fine.

Well, it should have been, anyway….

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Network Neutrality

Dan McGarry1 Comment

There was a story recently in the newspaper concerning a perceived need to ‘invent a new Internet’. It explained that the increasing use of music and video content was threatening to fill up our Internet connections, potentially bringing the whole system grinding to a halt. There’s been a lot of buzz about this recently, most of it deriving from telecommunications carriers and media companies in the US and elsewhere.

On the face of it, the arguments being presented are fairly straightforward. We’re changing the way we use the Internet, that much is true. We don’t rely nearly so much as we did on plain text spiced up with a few images. These days, Internet-based services provide tons of animation, music, videos, games, etc. All of this is designed to make information more compelling, more accessible to everyone.

Even as recently as last year, we in Vanuatu could only dream about downloading a TV show and watching it at our leisure, or listening live to a sporting event through Internet radio. For most of the population, this is still a dream, but it’s undeniable that our Internet services have improved vastly in a fairly short period of time. With the advent of affordable computers and Internet services on the horizon, the future holds a great deal of promise.

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The Wisdom of Crowds

Dan McGarry

The successful development of Vanuatu in this day and age is contingent on improvement in communications. In geographic terms, the majority of Vanuatu has little or no access to even basic communications services. In terms of population, the situation is better, but not by a lot.

We’ve known about this problem for a long time. We also have a very clear understanding of the limitations we face. Those of us who are devoted to solving technical problems in Vila, Santo and the islands have an intimate and detailed knowledge of the problems that can afflict us. Those working in development in more general terms have become adept at working around the shortcomings that poor communications place on us.

It’s clear as well that most – if not all – of the stakeholders in this game have some pretty clear ideas about how these problems can be addressed. It’s therefore difficult to understand why these issues continue to dog us as they do.

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Getting Out of the Way

Dan McGarry

I’ve got a friend visiting right now, a colleague of mine from my previous life in the world of software start-ups and corporate manoeuvring. For about as long as the World Wide Web has been around, we’ve been part of a community of explorers, people who defined the Web, extended it and made its strengths our own. From the mid 1990s through the so-called Dot-Com Boom, we had the sense that we were pioneers, marking trails across a new and exciting space. The frontier seemed to have infinite possibilities.

Human history shows us that after the explorers come the missionaries, and after the missionaries come the colonists. Carpet baggers, speculators, misfits and refugees seeking a better future away from the centre of things – these are among the first to arrive. Then come the homesteaders. Then come government, roads, taxes and schools. Before long, the landscape begins to look like the one they left behind.

In this version of events, those who get least mention are those who were there first. Those who, rather than shape the world in their own image, adapted to the shape of the world until it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended.

This column’s purpose is neither to re-hash the history of Vanuatu nor to moralise about past actions. It is nonetheless useful to understand the shape of human trends, and to understand the forces that drive them. This is especially important because of Vanuatu’s nearly unique position as a country whose family- and village-based culture and ways have remained more or less intact.

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