Thursday, November 10, 2011

Staying hidden

It's hard to remain anonymous, unknown. In my real life and online it's difficult. There are so many little things that can tip people off, so many mistakes you can make. For an explanation of just how easy it is to find people with just a few datapoints, I recommend this fascinating New Yorker article about attempting to unmask the founder of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, unfortunately not available to nonsubscribers on the site but you can try googling for the full article. Here are some selections:
Kaminsky ticked off the skills Nakamoto would need to pull it off. "He's a world-class programmer, with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language," he said. "He understands economics, cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking."
"Either there's a team of people who worked on this," Kaminsky said, "or this guy is a genius."

Kaminsky wasn't alone in this assessment. Soon after creating the currency, Nakamoto posted a nine-page technical paper describing how bitcoin would function. That document included direct references to the work of Stuart Haber, a researcher at H.P. Labs, in Princeton. Haber is a director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and knew all about bitcoin. "Whoever did this had a deep understanding of cryptography," Haber said when I called. "They've read the academic papers, they have a keen intelligence, and they're combining die concepts in a genuinely new way."

Haber noted that the community of cryptographers is very small: about three hundred people a year attend die most important conference, the annual gadiering in Santa Barbara. In all likelihood, Nakamoto belonged to this insular world. If I wanted to find him, die Crypto 2011 conference would be the place to start.
***
Nakamoto's extensive online postings have some distinctive characteristics. First of all, there is the flawless English. Over the course of two years, he dashed off about eighty thousand words—the approximate length of a novel—and made only a few typos. He covered topics ranging from die theories of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises to die history of commodity markets. Perhaps most interestingly, when he created the first fifty bitcoins, now known as the "genesis block," he permanendy embedded a brief line of text into the data: "The Times 03/fan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

This is a reference to a Times of London article that indicated diat the British government had failed to stimulate the economy. Nakamoto appeared to be saying diat it was time to try something new. The text, hidden amid a jumble of code, was a sort of digital battle cry. It also indicated that Nakamoto read a British newspaper. He used British spelling ("favour," "colour," "grey," "modernised") and at one point described something as being "bloody hard." An apartment was a "flat," math was "maths," and his comments tended to appear after normal business hours ended in the United Kingdom. In an initial post announcing bit-coin, he employed American-style spelling. But after that a British style appeared to flow naturally.

I had this in mind when I started to attend the lectures at the Crypto 2011 conference, including ones with titles such as "Leftover Hash Lemma, Revisited" and "Time-Lock Puzzles in the Random Oracle ModeL" In the back of a darkened auditorium, I stared at the attendee list. A Frenchman onstage was talking about testing the security of encryption systems. The most effective method, he said, is to attack die system and see if it fails. I ran my finger past dozens of names and addresses, circling residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland. There were nine.
How important is it that he hides?

Nakamoto had good reason to hide: people who experiment with currency tend to end up in trouble. In 1998, a Hawaiian resident named Bernard von Notllaus began fabricating silver and gold coins that he dubbed Libert}' Dollars. Nine years later, the U.S. government charged Notllaus with "conspiracy against die United States." He was found guilty and is awaiting sentencing. "It is a violation of federal law for individuals... to create private coin or currency systems to compete with the official coinage and currency of the United States," the F.B.I, announced at the end of die trial.
The moral of this story is that it is very hard to not have a presence, online or offline, that would eventually lead to your detection. Trying to keep stuff unknown is a good general strategy, but I think the only chance of real success is poisoning the well with disinformation.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Guest song: Perfect Liar

From a reader:



I’m drawn to the scent of sin and pa~ssion
To pay for it I swore to live and bear a cross forever more
You stumble, mess up again, you know you’re lea~ving me dry
The honey from the flower that blooms at night, what’s that, is it too bitter for you?

I am on full alert
Do~n’t let me get hu~rt
Leave me in good repair, ‘cause I’m a girl you gotta share

All~ the sins that I have piled up
All~ the skins that I have grinded on
I~f you looked between the gaps you sometimes could see
The sca~rs

The face that hides behind this gorgeous mask
Is something that you’ll never need to ask
It doesn’t matter, ‘cause I’ll lie to you anyways
Till you go insane

Your car with tha~t bla~ck paint job
You really think I’m so shallow that I’ll be satisfied with that?
But sti~ll, at night I will let you do with me what you like
And in return, just tell me one decent joke to make me laugh, well, can’t you do that?

I~ll pull out my fangs
Ligh~tly bite on your skin~
But you don’t mind because you’re such a masochist at heart?

There are too many men for me to say
I could just pick and toss them all away
That little fantasy about me you try to hide
It’s fa~ke

I o~bey you like a helpless dog
And through my cat-like eyes I laugh along
You really think that you’ve got me locked onto your leash?
Well, thi~nk again

Thi~s scenario that I’ve devised
Is like that drama where the boyfriend dies
So hold on tight to your false illusion o~f me
And rest now

All~ the sins that I have piled up
All~ the skins that I have grinded on
I~f you looked between the gaps you sometimes could see
The sca~rs

The face that hides behind this gorgeous mask
Is something that you never need to ask
It doesn’t matter, ‘cause I’ll lie to you anyways
Till you go insane

And with a skillful cut that’s cleaner than even those that past etched into me
I’ll finally emerge, show you what’s behind the shell
Take that secret with you to hell

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Psychopaths in real life

I stumbled upon this pretty bad Huffington Post article titled, "What are psychopaths like in real life?" It sounded promising at first:

Like many films, this one succeeded in depicting violence, and a spine-tingling coldness. But in real life, true psychopaths have many other character traits. In forensic psychiatry, it is our business to diagnose and treat psychopathy as well as a range of other personality disorders and mental illnesses.
It then goes on to state incorrectly that the word psychopath was first used in 1959 as a legal term in the Mental Health Act. Also, it turns out that in real life the psychopath looks pretty much what the movies typically over-emphasize: abused as children, criminally versatile, pathological liars, bullies, parasites, sexually promiscuous, disloyal, unfaithful, and for good measure generally everything else that we might despise in another human being. I'm not saying that these people do not exist, I am sure that they do. But doesn't it seem like a bit of a caricature to define them only in these ways? Is that what people are really asking when they want to know how psychopaths are in real life? They want to hear the same stories about the violent prisoner charming his way to the top of the social order? What about psychopaths that are living a real life, out in the world instead of behind bars?

Coincidentally, I was chatting with a close friend today who happens to be reading "The Sociopath Next Door" who made the following observations: "This Stout lady is so alarmist, like for a scientist." Also, " I hate these sociopath books. I keep on squinting my eyes in disapproval or furrowing my brow. You are discriminated against, buddy." Yeah, welcome to my world.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Quote: Self control

Better to be patient than powerful;
better to have self-control than to conquer a city.

Proverbs 16:32

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Sociopaths and fearlessness

Sociopaths are generally more fearless than empaths. Is it because having no empathy/conscience leads to fearlessess? Or does fearlessness lead to lack of empathy/conscience? One psychologist thinks it's the latter:
Fearlessness is likely one of the inherited traits that predisposes to antisocial personality and addiction.
But does that seem right? Does fearlessness in a sociopath predispose someone to become a sociopath? Or is fearlessness another symptom of the underlying cause of sociopathy?

On the one hand we could argue that fearlessness leads to an inability for sociopaths to learn from experience: if sociopaths don't fear consequences, they are not going to modify their behavior as a result of bad experiences. On the other hand, it is difficult to argue that a trait such a fearlessness would lead to other sociopathic traits like an inability to empathize, failure to conform to social norms, being manipulative, etc.

Or maybe it's neither. Maybe sociopathic traits were evolutionarily selected to make sociopaths a specialty tool in the arsenal of humanity: a subset of human kind that evolved to take care of business while the rest of humanity pussyfoots around. Some sociopathic traits are probably evolutionary spandrels, but the rest might come as part of a package that compliment each other and make sociopaths particularly suitable for certain purposes, just like how a predator has complimentary skills and traits to make him a hunting machine.
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