Day: January 3, 2006

Alex St. John vs. Anti-Spyware Software

For the past couple years, former Microsoft developer Alex St. John (he was one of the folks behind DirectX) has been writing a monthly column for CPU Magazine, and for about as long he’s been bitching and whining about anti-spyware programs.

After leaving Microsoft, St. John created Wild Tangent which, according to its website, “develops and distributes 1st party and 3rd party downloadable games through a broad network.” I know of the company mainly because Wild Tangent’s crappy games frequently come pre-installed on computers from HP, so every time I buy an HP computer or re-install the OS on an HP, its one of the things I have to go through and uninstall.

Anyway, St. John’s objection to anti-spyware software arose from the fact that a lot of anti-spyware programs flag Wild Tangent as spyware. It isn’t spyware, of course, but as St. John himself acknowledges, a deal that Wild Tangent made for the software to be bundled with AIM 5.0 fueled that spyware perception more than anything else (the short version is that WildTangent became uninstallable and created additional, non-AIM processes at the same time that AIM decided to foist pop-ups on its users — users thought Wild Tangent was spyware and causing the ads, and as St. John puts it, the whole episode was “a PR nightmare”).

But in responding to this PR nightmare, St. John’s proposes absurd solutions for the problem of spyware and similar malware. For example, Sony got caught distributing rootkits on CDs. St. John actually complains that the problem is that Sony doesn’t have enough access to user’s computers,

In a dramatic and humorous demonstration of how absurd the situation ahs become, Sony’s new CD copy-protection scheme, which hides running processes from Windows (Trojan horse?) and debugging tools to prevent music piracy, has been hacked to enable World of Warcraft cheaters to foil WoW’s Warden software (spyware?), which scans your computer for cheating software before you play WoW. Sony of course made a patch available to fix the security hole, but how will you get it if Sony’s invisible software can’t self-patch?

WT? Why would I want to grant to Sony — which has already screwed up my computer if I bought one of its copy-protected CDs — to then have the access to patch said software automatically? In fact, each of the patches that Sony has released to correct the rootkit problem have themselves suffered from one problem or another, in at least one case introducing new vulnerabilities. Yeah, damn, I wish Sony could auto-patch an infected PC.

Frankly, I don’t want software automatically patching. Take World of Warcraft (please). Every single time WoW attempts to update itself I get some sort of message — I assume from the MS firewall — warning me that this program is attempting to download a patch and do I want to allow this or block this. I want this sort of notification.

St. John think this is simply too inconvenient,

[After releasing Windows XP Service Pack 2] Microsoft followed up this maneuver with Microsoft AntiSpyware, a “spyware-blocking” application that also happens to prevent self-patching applications from running in the background or autolaunching without the baffled consumers’ express permission.

If an application cannot run in the background to download patches automatically in wasted bandwidth (as Windows does), then the only solution is to force consumers to patch download at the moment they try to use their applications. To further confuse consumers, Windows may presume to pop up any number of random warning dialogs when a legitimate application attempts to communicate home to check for patches.

A million times no. The most annoying thing about Windows is the number of programs which rudely set themselves to autolaunch without permission (every time I insert a flash drive, 15 different programs think they need to autolaunch and scan for music or photos, etc.)

Every program installed on my PC, including the OS, should get explicit permission before automatically downloading and installing a patch.

Source:

All Software Will Be “Spyware”. Alex St. John, Computer Power User Magazine, January 2006.

Geek Millenarianism and The Singularity

Ray Kurzweil spoke here a few weeks ago, although I missed his speech. I also haven’t read his latest book, The Singularity Is Near, but this review/summary makes it sound like the typical transhumanist rantings.

The idea behind The Singularity is pretty straightforward. We’ve all seen how quickly technology has transformed our lives. Twenty years ago almost nobody owned a personal computer, much less a networked computer. Today, most of us routinely use such technology and often to accomplish tasks for which we previously wouldn’t have imagined we’d even want.

The transhumanists simply extrapolate that trend outward a couple decades. As the pace of improvement in computer processing power and other inevitable discoveries in the biological and physical sciences not only increase but accelerate, we will reach a point where what comes next is impossible to predict in principle (in math and physics a singularity is a point where the normal rules break down — for example, in a physical singularity, such as that hypothesized in black holes, the density of matter is infinite and normal mathematical solutions about space and time are undefined).

So, take computer power. Computer power could grow so fast that at this Singularity, a worldwide sentient computer life form arises and decides to wipe us all out a la The Terminator. Or maybe computer systems spontaneously organize that are able to solve problems that human cognitive limits cannot tackle and our computers start churning out plans for time machines or cornucopia devices (like Star Trek’s replicators on steroids with almost no resource limits to what can be manufactured).

Such ideas make for great science fiction. My personal favorites are the novels of Charles Stross. I just finished Stross’ Iron Sunrise which postulates a self-conscious AI entity which violates causality for its own purposes and works to prevent human beings from doing the same — sort of a benevolent computer demigod.

As I said, this makes great fiction, but when people start to take it seriously as not only a possible, but a likely future, it comes across as a geeky new form of Millenarianism — the ages old belief that the end of the world as we know it is right around the corner.

Part of the problem is that trends are often cited which are interesting and appear to show rapid progress, but also fail to note just how computationally difficult some tasks are, which might throw a bit of a cold shower on just how far ever-increasing computational power will get us (leaving aside the very real possibility of ultimate physical limits on computational power).

For example, the review linked to above and Kurzweil both positively cite the ability of computers that can pretty much defeat all but the most gifted human beings at chess. So far, though, there is no chess computer that can always win at the game against every human being.

And when you start to delve into the computational problems with chess you start to get an idea of how computationally difficult even relatively straightforward problems can be. Ideally, it would be nice to see a computer simply solve chess — i.e., the computer would have access to the tree of all possible moves and be able to determine a position for White that would always win or draw (in much the same way that a simple game like Tic Tac Toe is solved).

Good luck — the decision tree for chess is immense, as in 10^120 possible board positions immense. In contrast, there are believed to be only 10^75 atoms in the universe. If you have a computer the size of the universe with a few billion years to spare working at the problem, then you’ve got a shot at solving chess. Otherwise, forget about it.

It turns out even a relatively simple game such as checkers has an immense decision tree as well and may not be solvable in the forseeable future, though it is probably solvable with enough computer power and enough centuries to churn away at the problem.

For the difficulties in more important research, consider the well-known difficulties in computing protein folding problems even after they are greatly simplified.

There is also the issue of just how much longer the trend of cheaper, faster computing power can be maintained. As Gordon Moore, author of the much-misunderstood Moore’s Law, told TechWorld.Com earlier this year when asked how much longer current trends in increasing computer power could continue,

It can’t continue forever — the nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster approaches. But in terms of size you can see that we’re approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it will be two or generations of chip before we get that far.

Moore is also skeptical of the ability of nanocomputing and similar technologies to grow beyond specialized applications such as for bioanalytic tests.

Does Abortion Cause Women to Be Physically Abusive?

Does abortion cause women to be more likely to physically abuse their children? That’s how research by Bowling Green State University professor Priscilla Coleman is being portrayed by conservative news outlets like The Washington Times, but the claim largely falls apart on close examination.

Coleman studied 518 low-income women in Baltimore that included 118 abusive mothers, 119 neglecting mothers, and 281 mothers with no history of either neglect or abuse. Out of that sample, Coleman found that women who had experienced any sort of pregnancy loss, such as an abortion of miscarriage, had a 99 percent higher risk of abusing their children than those who had never had an abortion according to the Washington Times.

The Times quotes Coleman as saying,

There’s a good number of women who have abortions, experience it as a … loss with bereavement, some guilt — guilt is a pretty common experience with abortion. Those kind of effects could cause anger, and we know parents who abuse their children often have anger-control issues.

But does this really tell us that having an abortion is linked to physical abuse of children? Consider another study that Coleman did that used just this sort of methodology.

For a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Coleman examined 56,000 women who were part of California’s Medicaid program. Of that sample, 15,000 had had abortions, compared to 41,000 who had not. Coleman then tracked admissions for psychiatric illnesses by the women in the year after they either had an abortion or gave birth.

Only 0.7 percent of women who gave birth were hospitalized for psychiatric problems, while 1.5 percent of the women who had an abortion were hospitalized for psychiatric problems in the following year. Moreover, women who had abortions had a 160 percent higher risk of being admitted to a hospital for psychiatric women in the first 90 days after having an abortion than did women who gave birth in the first 90 days afterward. After four years, however, the women who had abortions only had a 50 percent higher risk of hospitalization for a psychiatric condition as compared to the women who gave birth.

But as even Coleman herself acknowledged, what these studies cannot tell us is if women who have abortions are more likely to be abusive or suffer psychiatric problems or if women more likely to be abusive or suffer psychiatric problems are also simply more likely to have abortions. As Arizona State University professor Nancy Russo told the Toledo Blade,

It is just as plausible that the direction of causality is reversed . . . that psychiatric problems cause women who become pregnant to feel less capable of raising a child and to terminate their pregnancy.

Coleman agrees, telling the Toledo Blade,

There are a whole lot of factors that lead up to the decision [to have an abortion], a whole lot of lifestyle circumstances, and that can be predictive. So when you look at the negative effects, what are you really looking at? is it a product of their choice? Or are they experiencing depression or whatever because they were battered? Or because of the abortion? It’s hard to tease apart.

All of these comments apply equally to the claim about abortion and child abuse being linked. It could be that women who are more likely to abuse children are also more likely to have abortions.

Sources:

After decades of research, evaluationg abortion’s effect still difficult. Jenni Laidman, Toledo Blade, January 22, 2004.

Abuse risk linked to abortion. Shepherd Pittman, The Washington Times, November 3, 2005.

Abortion Linked to Abuse. Josh Montez, Family.Org, December 30, 2005.