The Life of Lou Ruppert

LSD for computers and Little Red Riding Hood’s unsavory new roommate.

We’ve been seeing more machines on campus with adware and malware performing a technique known as DNS hijacking. DNS is the system a computer uses to look up where to find web sites and things on the internet. The computer’s view of reality is strongly tied to its being able to trust the DNS service. When malware or adware hijacks DNS, it’s like the computer is tripping on LSD. It asks for an image from one site, but receives it from another. It sends its email password to what it thinks is gmail, but it arrives at a mafia datacenter in the Ukraine. It can’t trust anything it sees. It’s gone crazy. The virus writers have slipped your machine a cocktail of digital psychotropics, and when it’s woken up, your credit cards are maxed out and your passwords are in the hands of some guy running a spam operation. You’re like little red riding hood, trusting that anything wearing a nightgown is her grandmother, only to get gobbled up by the wolf.

Black Swans? Inconceivable!

I’ve been reading Seth Roberts’ blog, and he mentions a book by Nassim Taleb called the Black Swan. It’s a study of randomness and how people tend to predict the future based on what they’ve seen in the past, which isn’t always so accurate. The book’s title comes from the old practice of using the idea of a black swan as an example of something that could not happen. Back in the days of philosophers, the only swans people knew of were white. So any non-white swan was clearly a fraud. But then when Europeans colonized Australia, guess what they found? Black Swans. It would have been impossible for anyone to predict finding something like that, yet it existed the whole time. We tend to decide prematurely that we know things, or ignore indicators that we don’t know things as well as we do. There’s always room for that random thing to come along and change how we see the world. I like that.

I finished reading The Survival Kit for Overseas Living. I think the best thing in the book is a list of fifty questions which test how much you really know about a particular culture. Much like the question of the black swan, it’s amazing how much we don’t know even when we think we do. Good stuff.

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