a-cubed.info

I started re-reading Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden urban fantasy series just before new year. I had the latest (and it turns out, probably last) in the series and I often though not always re-read the entire series with a new book. Since I can’t remember which ones I finished before the new year and which ones after I’m just going to give a qick description of the entire series. Particular now that Total Eclipse appears to be the last in the series, this seems appropriate. These nine books are a nice little urban fantasy series about people with elemental powers to control earth (includes healing), fire (may include electricity) and air/water (weather). The viewpoint character (Joane Baldwin) is an interesting mix of shallow fashionista with a somewhat incongruous love of and knowledge about fast cars. She’s very powerful and goes through a Jack Chalker’s Dancing Gods series of adventures periodically losing some or all of her powers (sometimes along with her memories) but gradually “powering up” to become one of the most powerful humans on the planet. Alongside these humans are the Djinn. Caine does a nice job of taking the arabic djinn myths (including the afrit variants) and building a rationale for the binding of very powerful entities into breakable bottles. Baldwin occasionally does stupid things in the furtherance of the plot and many of the NPCs (human as well as Djinn) are rather overly venal, but the action races along well enough that mostly this can be overlooked. It’s pretty well-written and has a very good sense of continuity given the fairly complex system Caine posits. There’s a romantic sub-thread running through all nine books, but it only descends into masturbatory sex scene descriptions twice or so. To me this series definitely falls into the “urban fantasy with a romance sideline” “rather than the “romance set in an urban fantasy world” genre. Well worth a look if you like light urban fantasy.

A Magnitude 4.7 quake off the coast of Honshu at 10:40am. This is the first time I’ve been in an earthquake (that I could feel) in my office. That wasn’t much of a shake here in Tokyo, though. A larger one (larger at my location) hit at 12:20pm, now showing on the earthquake monitors as around magnitude 5.7(USGS)-5.9(EMSC/GFZ). Anyway, no problems for me, though as this is off the coast up towards Senda, I suspect people up there are feeling more nervous again. The Japanese Met Agency haven’t issued a tsunami warning, which is good.

Things had quietened down in November and December from the afterschocks of last year’s big one in March. I wonder when a region like Japan is regarded as stopping having aftershocks and is back into normal mode where a new earthquake is regarded as its own event.

Since first coming to Japan in 2007 I have been researching Japanese government identity registration systems. Although providing some of the background to the papers I’ve co-authored on social and legal aspects of privacy in Japan I haven’t published any of this work yet. The trouble has been that it keeps getting bigger. Every time I think we’ve got a handle on the issue and just have to tie off a few loose ends, I find that the loose ends are actually spaghetti links to a new area that needs covering and which changes our view of the current situation. So far I’ve read material covering Japanese registration of residents back to the import of a Chinese family registration system in the 6th century up to the merging of the database for the current citizen and non-citizen registration systems. A recent book on Japanese immigration, focussing primarily but not solely on the Zainichi Korean question and its development from 1945 to the early 1980s (though including some relevant background from before the war and including a round-up of developments up to 2008) seemed a useful addition to my reading on this subject. I wasn’t disappointed. Borderline Japan (Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era) by Tessa Suzuki-Morris is an excellent examination of the status of the main group of foreigners in Japan. Extensively edited to create a single coherent volume from a number of previously published pieces, this also adds more depth to the constraints of material published as book chapters or journal articles elsewhere, and makes it available in one volume. The xenophobia, communist witch-hunting and duplicity of both the Japanese government and others (notably the US and the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the governments of both North and South Korea) through over sixty years of dealing with the post-colonial issue of those of Korean descent in Japan are dealt with in good but not excruciating detail. I learned a lot about how others living in Japan have been, and indeed still are, treated by the Japanese government and understand a lot more about the dynamics of the political situation here with regards to foreigners rights. The origins of elements of my core research interest, that of government ID registration systems, were clearly visible here although that wasn’t the focus of this book.

Even without a research reason, I think this was a very useful book for anyone living in or considering living in Japan, whether Japanese or not.

I’m planning to try and blog a bit more in 2012. I wrote very little in 2011 due to various personal circumstances leaving me with little time for this kind of thing. One thing I’ve decided to do is to try and write a little something on each book that I finish reading, both fiction and non-fiction. The first non-fiction is coming up very soon.

A Cthulhu Knit Cap.

I have been watching the emerging news about the activities of the News of the Screws with some horror. While I knew that the journalists and editors working for Murdoch generally and the tabloid rags specifically were quite lacking in ethics, I hadn’t quite realised the despicability to which they had descended, typified by the emergence of allegations that they had hacked into the mailbox of missing (later discovered murdered) Milly Dowler and even deleted messages on her voicemail because it was full and they wanted to hear more frantic messages from her family and friends worried sick that something serious had happened to the poor girl, as it turned out it had.

My sinking feeling is further deepened by the fact that this utterly egregious lack of any sense of proportion on behalf of the so-called journalists at this now blessedly defunct rag (though as many have commented the gap in the market it leaves will no doubt be filled by another publication from Murdoch’s odious empire soon enough) will serve to chill the borderline cases where the public interest truly is served by obtaining information via technically illegitimate means. The Telegraph’s exposure of MP’s expenses fiddles is a good case in point. The expenses information they obtained and published were clearly gained in violation of both law and civil service regulations. However, the public interest (not the prurient attntion of the public but the over-riding benefit of lack of corruption in elected representatives) should in such cases be allowed to over-ride the technical illegality of the act involved in gaining the information. Sort of a reverse “fruit of the poisoned tree” argument – where the resulting information should be disclosed in the broader public benefit, any illegaility in obtaining it should be forgiven in the balance. Without such balance in the laws despotism and tyranny can flourish under the cover of the chilling effects of personal liability for obtaining information illicitly. This requires those with the possibility to exert this defence to act with care and strong ethics in only pursuing information truly in the public interest, for example health information about a minister might be fair game if those health problems are being concealed and potentially impact their ability to do an important job. Health information about their baby children is NOT fair game – no matter how much I disagree with Gordon Brown on policies and whether he was a suitable candidate for Prime Minister, I feel great sympathy for what he had to go through with the press intrusion into the health of his young children.

I agree with others that it is time that the Press Complaints Commission was given a proper statutory basis and independence from the industry it is supposed to regulate, but also from the government whose interests may diverge from that of the public at large in individual cases. A difficult but not impossible task.

From a talk by Anna Ronkainen of the University of Helsinki, at GikII VI:

Zombie = Human – Consciousness

(The philosophical definition of a zombie.)

However, some regard consciousness as an illusion, so all humans are zombies!

Program

I am (well, was by the time I finished editing this) currently at the Security and Human Behaviour conference at CMU in Pittsburgh. Here are my live notes from the presentations. (more…)

As Anderson discusses in his Security Engineering book, debates on fredom of information about security devices, starting with locks and keys, have been around for centuries. The latest salvo in this is the US (Massachusetts State Legislature and US Federal Congress) legislative proposal sometimes referred to as the “right to repair”. This proposal is about ensuring competition in the car servicing maintenance and repair market. In recent years, somewhat like the printer manufacturers and their attempts to prevent refilling of ink cartridges or the use of third party cartridges in their printers, car manufacturers have been addding in anti-features to the electronics running inside their cars. These electronics, which minutely control many aspects of the engine operation, will refuse to recognise parts from thirrd party manufacturers annd use proprietary data access protocols and encryption keys to prevent access to the diagnostic data that allows mechanics to know which parts need cleaning/repairing/replacing. Without access to these protocols independent garages can’t work on modern cars. As Roberrt Charette points out, the age old issue of access to information being a security risk is raising its head again as roups like the police and insurers are claiming that making it a right for people to access information about the things they own also gives thieeves access to information which helps them. As Anderson pointed out, there are enough smart thieves out there, and there are enough people with access to the information anyway that it’s not a security feature to not make it more generally available. As well as claiming that thieves and their associates could use this information to steal and re-process more cars, there are claims that this would allow more counterfeit parts on the market. All these claims are the standard mistakes about security by obscurity. Enough people already have access to this information that any criminal or counterfeit parts manufacturer can already get it. The restriction of access to this material is simply a matter of placing extra barriers in the way to a competitive marketplace. Indeed, the belief that such restrictions inhibit counterfeit parts increases risk by introducing a false sense of security. (True counterfeit parts are indeed a problem as they may not be subject to the correct safety testing and/or customers may be paying over the odds for what they beleive are quality parts which are shoddily manufactured.)

The Stross effect is when a science fiction or techno-thriller writer is writing a near-future piece and before the book is published (sometimes before it is finished and submitted to the publisher) real world events catch up with or even overtake the fiction. I recently posted about a paper I’d submitted to a journal. That submission is still under review. In the paper I talked about the recent case where a school pupil sitting the exntrance exams at various Japanese universities was using an iPhone on his lap to post queries about the questions to online Q&A sites. I also talked about the development of wireless Internet connectivity and very discrete cameras that will make it much easier for people to cheat in closed book exams. And before the paper has even been reviewed we have such a report.http://tinyurl.com/3fcmmu6.