Stuff I'm reading, mid-October edition

There was wind last night, but no rain.

Rain to the north, they say.

But not here.

• Harvest and Yield: Not A Natural Cure for Tradeoff Confusion

  Yield is the availability metric that most practitioners end up working with, and it's worth noting that its different from CAP's A. The authors don't define it formally, but treat it as a long-term probability of response rather than the probability of a response conditioned on there being a failure. That's a good common-sense definition, and one that fits well with the way that most practitioners think about availability.

• Apple's "Warrant-Proof" Encryption

  Code is often buggy and insecure; the more code a system has, the less likely it is to be secure. This is an argument that has been made many times in this very context, ranging from debates over the Clipper Chip and key escrow in the 1990s to a recent paper by myself, Matt, Susan Landau, and Sandy Clark. The number of failures in such systems has been considerable; while it is certainly possible to write more secure code, there's no reason to think that Apple has done so here. (There's a brand-new report of a serious security hole in iOS.) Writing secure code is hard. The existence of the back door, then, enables certain crimes: computer crimes. Add to that the fact that the new version of iOS will include payment mechanisms and we see the risk of financial crimes as well.

• Keyless SSL: The Nitty Gritty Technical Details

  Extending the TLS handshake in this way required changes to the NGINX server and OpenSSL to make the private key operation both remote and non-blocking (so NGINX can continue with other requests while waiting for the key server). Both the NGINX/OpenSSL changes, the protocol between the CloudFlare’s server, and the key server were audited by iSEC Partners and Matasano Security. They found the security of Keyless SSL equivalent to on-premise SSL. Keyless SSL has also been studied by academic researchers from both provable security and performance angles.

• Intel® SGX for Dummies (Intel® SGX Design Objectives)

  At its root, Intel® SGX is a set of new CPU instructions that can be used by applications to set aside private regions of code and data. But looking at the technology upward from the instructions is analogous to trying to describe an animal by examining its DNA chain. In this short post I will try to uplevel things a bit by outlining the objectives that guided the design of Intel® SGX and provide some more detail on two of the objectives.

• Ads Don't Work That Way

  The key differentiating factor between the two mechanisms (inception and imprinting) is how conspicuous the ad needs to be. Insofar as an ad works by inception, its effect takes place entirely between the ad and an individual viewer; the ad doesn't need to be conspicuous at all. On the other hand, for an ad to work by cultural imprinting, it needs to be placed in a conspicuous location, where viewers will see it and know that others are seeing it too.

• The ultimate weapon against GamerGate time-wasters: a 1960s chat bot that wastes their time

  Alan Turing proposed that an artificial intelligence qualified as a capable of thought if a human subject, in conversation with it and another human, cannot tell them apart; the strange thing about the Eliza Twitter bot is it doesn't come across as any more like a machine than those who keep repeating their points over and over and over, ad nauseum. It's difficult to decide who's failed the Turing test here.

• Gabriel Knight’s Creator Releases Incredible 20th Anniversary Remake

  Staring at the remake version brings all those old memories of DOS mouse drivers and command prompts flooding back. Gazing at protagonist Gabriel Knight’s dazzling, polychromatic bookstore (your base of operations in New Orleans as the game begins) is like seeing the mental interpolation your brain made of the original pixelated wash beautifully, if weirdly, reified.

• Bridge Troll

  I know this sounds a bit crazy, but trust me, there’s a troll up there! He or she, it’s tough to tell the gender of trolls, is approximately two feet tall, made of steel, and perched atop the southern end of the transverse concrete beam where the eastern cable makes contact with the road deck. The troll cannot be seen by car or from the bike path next to the bridge—you need to be underneath the bridge, on a boat to actually see the bridge troll.

• Don’t Mourn the Passing of the New York Times Chess Column

  If those who know enough about the game to understand the diagrams in a newspaper chess column can access thousands of times more information, free and instantly, than a weekly column could possibly provide, then why run one at all? The answer is that most weekly newspaper chess columns don’t need to exist and won’t in the near future. The one exception: when there’s an excellent writer and chess professional at the helm, someone like Robert Byrne.

• Serbia vs. Albania in Belgrade brings their troubled history to the fore

  But even if football takes the headlines, there is still the sense that Tuesday night might be an opportunity missed. On October 22, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama will visit Belgrade to discuss bilateral relations with his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vukic. No Albanian leader has visited Belgrade since Enver Hoxha in 1946.

  It is significant, and maybe it brings a glimmer of hope that a repeat of Tuesday's fixture might one day be all about the game instead. Having a harmonious football match to oil the conversation would have done little harm, but the anticipation of that noticeable absense inside Partizan Stadium stands as a reminder that sport does not always have the power to untangle wider complexities.

• In Transition

  We picked 10 of the most progressive skaters to choose one location each and film a full part.

• Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride

  The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.