The rise of the knowledgeables

Over at the Typist, a missive on the future of journalism:

First, as the quoted tweet suggests, this isn’t about whether The Information itself will be successful — financially or journalistically — in the long haul. This is about the model by which it operates, and the major role I think that model will play in the future of journalism.

Secondly, let’s differentiate between journalism and reporting. The latter is only one part — integral as it may be — of the former. I think big organizations will dominate news breaking and reporting for a long time to come. They will still be responsible for the “what,” but less and less for “what does it mean?”. They’ll serve mainly as middlemen of information — an important and nontrivial task in itself — but not much more beyond that.

In the future, we’ll have ‘knowledgeables’.

Knowledgeables won’t “kill” today’s journalists. They will simply supplant them where anything substantially more complicated than a “what” is needed. Nobody is going to go out of business when this happens. In fact, as the separation between reporters and knowledgeables (both journalists) becomes more dichotomous, everyone wins. Everyone wins by doing what they do best. In this case: Journalists deliver, knowledgeables analyze. This is called specialization.

Forming small, self-owned, and single-focus groups, knowledgeables will play a different game than the one news companies are struggling to survive in. To be sustainable, these specialized cells won’t have to break any news, serve a meager diet of ads as content, or deal with every item out there just to feed the hungry ratings machine. They won’t cater to everyone, only to their everyone.
 

I agree with the general sentiment, and the increased returns to specialization in the internet era (maybe Nate Silver should have picked a hedgehog as a logo instead of a fox). Examples of knowledgeables include John Gruber, Bruce Schneier, and Patrick Smith.

The art of the password

Good overview of the state of password creation (and cracking) by William Poundstone.

Though I never bother with such websites, I hadn't realized the following:

Have you ever wasted a few moments with a sketchy website that promises to reveal your Klingon name (wizard name, ghetto name, porn star name, etc.)? Some of these sites are fronts for password-harvesting operations. They’ll ask you for some personal data—mixed in with Trekkie trivia —and prompt you to make up a password. Scammers know that the password you supply is likely to be similar or identical to ones you use elsewhere. They may sell collected passwords on the black market for about $20 each.

A password is like the key to your home. There are weak locks and strong locks, but neither does any good when a pickpocket swipes your key. Security is always about the weakest link.
 

Poundstone's advice on picking a secure password:

The best way to use the pass-phrase idea is to turn the conventional advice on its head. Instead of thinking of a phrase and converting it to a password (that won’t be all that random), get a truly random password and convert it to an easy‑to-remember phrase.

...

A password, a pass-phrase, a mnemonic—what’s the big deal? The difference is that a random-character password is the gold standard of security. It’s better than any human-chosen password could be. It will still be good even if everyone in the world adopts this scheme.

A random-character password of reasonable length is, for practical purposes, unguessable with today’s technology. It won’t appear in a list of popular passwords. A mass attacker could guess a random password only in a brute-force search. With upper- and lowercase letters and numbers, there are sixty-two possible characters. (I won’t count punctuation marks, as not all sites allow them.) That means it would take 62^8 guesses to be certain of hitting an eight-character password. That’s over 218 trillion guesses.

That effectively rules out an Internet mass attack and would slow down a targeted attack. Accepting the claim that some forensic software can spit out 2.8 billion guesses a second, it would take about twenty-two hours to make that many guesses. That’s secure enough for most people—should you disagree, you’re welcome to add a few more characters.

The politics of Game of Thrones

I tried to read the Song of Fire and Ice by George R.R. Martin and couldn't get through much more than one book. The prose is rough, functional at best. 

The TV series, though, I love. The first book ended up reading like an adaptation of the first season of the series, so closely did the two hew to each other back then. It made sense to me to find out Martin had worked as a Hollywood screenwriter for much of the 80's and part of the 90's.

What Martin does do well, and what makes Game of Thrones more fascinating than much of the fantasy series out there, is delve deeply into realpolitik. Characters win or lose not so much based on whether they are good or bad in character as whether they're the smartest player in the political arena, the so-called "game of thrones." Thus we see many characters killed off in defiance of audience expectations. That's the part of the series that I love the most, beyond the high and increasing production values (a noticeable increase in quality after season one), beautiful locations (refreshing in this day and age of cartoonish digital backdrops to see the real world serve as the backdrop for so much of the series), and fun performances (there are some weak links, like Danaerys, but most of the lead performances are strong).

Martin also manages to challenge the audience's desire for clean moral judgments (with the exception of characters like Joffrey who seem horrific through and through).

Much of this comes out in a really good interview of Martin in Rolling Stone.

A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly. 

Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone – they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I've tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.

...

Early on, one critic described the TV series as bleak and embodying a nihilistic worldview, another bemoaned its "lack of moral signposts." Have you ever worried that there's some validity to that criticism? 

No. That particular criticism is completely invalid. Actually, I think it's moronic. My worldview is anything but nihilistic.

Some of your most contemptible characters are also among the story's greatest truth-tellers. One of the most riveting moments in the TV series took place in the Battle of Blackwater episode, which you wrote the script for, when Sandor says to Sansa, "The world was built by killers, so you'd better get used to looking at them." 

Truth is sometimes hard to hear. Two of the central phrases are true, but they are not truths that most human beings like to contemplate. Winter is coming and Valar morghulis – all men must die. Mortality is the inescapable truth of all life . . . and of all stories, too.

Make it harder to cross the street

It turns out some of the key FCC people working to determine the future of net neutrality used to work at Comcast. The same path is also traveled in reverse quite frequently.

But overall, the FCC is one of many agencies that have fallen victim to regulatory capture. Beyond campaign contributions and other more visible aspects of the influence trade in Washington, moneyed special interest groups control the regulatory process by placing their representatives into public office, while dangling lucrative salaries to those in office who are considering retirement. The incentives, with pay often rising to seven and eight figure salaries on K Street, are enough to give large corporations effective control over the rule-making process.

...

The revolving door, however, provides a clear and semi-legal way for businesses to directly give unlimited cash and gifts to officials who act in their favor. One of the most famous examples of this dynamic is the case of Meredith Attwell Baker, an FCC Commissioner who left her job right after voting in favor of the Comcast merger with NBC. Her next career move? She became a high-level lobbyist for Comcast, the company she had just blessed. Earlier this week, she announced her next gig, as president of CTIA, the primary wireless industry trade group. She’ll have her work cut out for her in lobbying her former colleagues. CTIA has already warned the FCC from taking up any new net neutrality regulations.
 

In a democracy, if you don't want the money of corporations completely taking over policy-making, you can't allow people leaving office to immediately cross the street to a corner office on K-Street with a huge salary, and you also shouldn't allow those public officials to go work for a company in an industry they were regulating before. It's much too simple a way to essentially offer a deferred bribe.

Unbelievable but true facts

A trillion is a gigantic number. Really, really gigantic, but most people can't truly understand the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion because those numbers are almost unfathomable.
So instead of using money to describe numbers, I'm going to use time. I fudged some dates or numbers to use major events; forgive me.
1 (one) second ago, you started reading this sentence.
10 (ten) seconds ago, you were about halfway through my first paragraph.
100 (one hundred) seconds ago, you were reading someone else's comment (depending on how this is ranked).
1000 (one thousand) seconds ago, if you started browsing reddit, you're probably finishing around now. My source is very old, but it's the most recent that I could find.
10,000 (ten thousand) seconds ago, if you started watching The Dark Knight or The Dark Knight Rises, you'd be ending around now.
100,000 (one hundred thousand) seconds ago, you were browsing yesterday's reddit.
1,000,000 (one million) seconds ago, if you felt sick from a bad case of the flu, you'd be feeling better around now.
10,000,000 (ten million) seconds ago, if you got pregnant, you'd start showing around now.
100,000,000 (one hundred million) seconds ago, Deepwater Horizon just stopped leaking.
1,000,000,000 (one billion) seconds ago, President Reagan was one year into his first term.
10,000,000,000 (ten billion) seconds ago, the Salem Witch Trials were happening.
100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) seconds ago, the Trojan War just ended and Helen of Troy is about to commit suicide.
1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) seconds ago, the oldest known cave paintings were being painted.
10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) seconds ago, Neanderthals had just started wandering the Earth (although some estimates say they were around before then).
100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) seconds ago, Africa collided with Europe to form the Mediterranean Sea.
1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) seconds ago, South America detached from Antarctica and the Alps started to rise.
 

More of these in this Reddit thread. Another classic:

The number of ways to shuffle a deck of cards is 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.
 

To wit, “There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards then there are atoms in our solar system.” Or, for a more impressive party conversation trick, have someone shuffle a deck of cards and then note that the arrangement of cards they just produced has likely never been seen in the history of the universe.