THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
02/04/05 -- Vol. 23, No. 32 (Whole Number 1268)
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
The Universal Language (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Strange and Amazing Facts All About Computer and Internet
Security (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Comment on DARWIN'S CHILDREN (by Tom Russell)
THE MURDER ARTIST by John Case (book review by Tom Russell)
IN GOOD COMPANY (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
AN ITALIAN ROMANCE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (THE DIAMOND AGE, GRANT COMES EAST,
and THE RELIGIONS NEXT DOOR) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Universal Language (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was passing a table at a science fiction convention that had
people promoting the language Esperanto. I suppose it occurred to
me to wonder why espers would even need a language. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Strange and Amazing Facts All About Computer and Internet
Security (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
At Philcon 2004 I went to a panel on "Computer/Internet Fraud"
with panelists Barbara Higgins, Pete Radatti, Eric Raymond, and
Christina Yoder. I took notes on what I found interesting and
did not want to forget. Initially I was thinking of writing the
panel in an article intended for Evelyn's convention report. But
as I am reading the notes I am looking more things up on the
Internet and adding some information to them. They are probably
no longer good as a convention report, but you, dear reader,
might find them of interest. Errors in information here are
probably my transcription mistake and not that of the panelists.
This was a pretty humorless bunch if I remember rightly. The
jokes are all mine.
* Junk e-mail (or spam) was estimated to be 70 percent of all e-
mail traffic last year. Constructive e-mail is really just a
small Internet sideline these days. If you don't have some sort
of spam filters reading your e-mail is like reading a Rupert
Murdoch magazine. However, there is actually some major progress
against spam, contrary to most expert expectation. Major
spammers, at least within the United States, are being
prosecuted. We are starting to see actual felony spam
convictions. The State of Texas used federal anti-spam
legislation for the first time to sue a University of Texas
student--who was the world's fourth-largest illegal spam
operation. Can you imagine that? One college kid is tying up so
much of the Internet. I remember when kids in college were
content with innocent, good-hearted pranks like the midnight theft
of all the toilet seats from the women's dorm.
* Legal action is going beyond just spammers. On January 28, a
teenager was sentenced to a year and a half of prison for
releasing a variant of the Blaster worm. That worm attacked more
than 48,000 computers. Contrary to myth, worms do not just attack
Apples.
* AD-AWARE is a leading spyware searcher and one of the better
ones. As their site says, "Ad-Aware is designed to provide
advanced protection from known Data-mining, aggressive
advertising, Parasites, Scumware, selected traditional Trojans,
Dialers, Malware, Browser hijackers, and tracking components." I
didn't know there were so many breeds of malicious software
running around. As yet no software will block mail from your
parents asking why haven't you written.
* Check you have AD-AWARE itself, with that name. There are
look-alikes that have similar names but are really spyware
themselves, for example ADWARE.
* It is good to run Spybot SEARCH&DESTROY before running AD-
AWARE. Some spyware on your computer is getting smart and can
actually disable AD-AWARE. And running both in that order is
probably best.
* If you have constant flashing on your modem, even if you are
not working on the PC, it is a good sign that you're have
malicious software that someone has planted on your computer.
Either that or you PC has achieved sentience and is ordering the
PC equivalent of a pizza. That latter is considered unlikely.
* Don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer if you can avoid it; it
is full of security holes. The new Firefox is a much more
secure browser. It is a new browser designed to be much harder
for hackers to find loopholes in.
* Don't use Microsoft Outlook for the same reason.
* It is a good idea not to trust any Microsoft product you do not
have use. Microsoft's security is weak and its software also is
a popular target for hackers. Don't drink Microsoft beverages.
Don't wear Microsoft shoes. Don't brush with Microsoft
toothpaste. Never sign your name with a Microsoft pen.
* I asked if Netscape Navigator (Evelyn's choice) and Opera
(mine) are safe browsers to use. Netscape 4.2 was fairly secure.
(What are we talking? 1997?); later versions of Netscape are
not. The Opera Browser actually has pretty good security, the
panelists thought. That's a relief.
* The panel recommended POPFILE as a Bayesian filter, which is
good. A Bayesian filter learns from the user what words he tends
to use in mail and what words are less likely. Not many of us
have the word Viagra show up a lot in our e-mail conversations.
Other words show up more often, like the name of your spouse.
You train a Bayesian filter by telling it what e-mail is spam and
what is not and it gets very smart at recognizing what of your
mail is real and what is spam. Of course I just said "Viagra"
above so I have just confused your Bayesian filter if indeed you
have one. Oh, well. Viagra. Viagra. Rolex. See
http://tinyurl.com/6ffs5 for a technical explanation of what is
going on.
* Steganography (not to be confused with stenography or a
stegosaurus) is a technique of hiding a message where it will not
be obvious. An example is to hide it in the data of a GIF or
JPEG picture or a sound file. There are so many bits in the
encoding of a picture that are a lot of bits that can be twiddled
without the picture having much of a noticeable change. It will
looks just fine to the eye, but it will have encoded in it a
message that only the recipient knows to look for. At the time
of the panel at least one panelist said that there is a lot of
steganographic messages in images on eBay. Well, they thought
that at the time of Philcon. More recently Niels Provos, a
computer science graduate student at the University of Michigan
(yeah, Go Blue, let's get that out of the way), examined two
million images from eBay for steganographic messages and none
were found. That does not mean the messages are there or not,
but it does mean if they are there they are not elementary to
find. Looking beyond eBay, Provos analyzed another one million
images and found 20,000 that seemed suspicious. See
http://tinyurl.com/4vtne and http://tinyurl.com/52tbm. He
also found 1352 different pictures (so far) that if you throw out
every bit but those that are in positions divisible by 666, you
got (small) pictures of the Virgin Mary. And she looks like a
different woman in every one of them.
* PCs unprotected by a firewall are very likely to be infected.
The mean time to infection gone from seventeen minutes (the mean
a year or so ago) to under five minutes. One site said that at
universities it is less than two minutes. For a firewall, a
hardware firewall is vastly superior to a software firewall.
* There is no security with wireless. Don't expect it. Don't
hope for it. I remember hearing of a bank that was sold a system
in which all their electronic communications were wireless. This
they were told was secure because there were no cables to tap.
Anyway, don't hope for it. Don't expect it. There is no
security with wireless. Bupkis.
* A panelist drew a distinction between privacy and security. If
you are being chased by an assassin and you hide in a cave you
will have privacy, but the cave could be found and so you may not
have security. If you hide in the middle of a huge mob of
people, say Times Square, midnight, New Year's Eve you will not
have privacy, but you will be hard to find and secure. Except
you are liable to have some drunk making brech on your new winter
coat. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Comment on DARWIN'S CHILDREN (by Tom Russell)
I'm a fan of Greg Bear, but perhaps not as much as Joe Karpierz.
(Joe wrote a review of DARWIN'S CHILDREN for the 01/21/05 of the
MT VOID.)
I'd read and enjoyed DARWIN'S RADIO, so when the sequel came out
I put in a request for it at our town library. About the same
time I also put in a request for another book, THE SPEED OF DARK
by Elizabeth Moon. That book had been recommended to me by
Evelyn. [By the way Evelyn, thank you for the recommendation.]
I was about a third of the way through DARWIN'S CHILDREN when the
library called: THE SPEED OF DARK had come in. Out of curiosity
I put Bear's book aside to read a little of THE SPEED OF DARK. I
never went back.
What struck me were the similarities between the characters in
the two books. In Bear's book the characters have unusual
skills, presumably representative of what a next step in human
evolution might bring. In Moon's book the characters have
similar skills. But in Moon's book those skills are caused by
autism; they are "backward" (in the sense that any debilitating
disease reduces human potential).
Bear's book is the grander adventure but Moon's book is more
thought-provoking.
Like Mark I try to be a student of everything, but I'm going to
admit little knowledge of evolution and even less about autism,
so I leave it to you all to decide if I'm correct in my
comparison of the two books. [-tr]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE MURDER ARTIST by John Case (book review by Tom Russell)
[After my comments in response to Joe Karpierz' review of
DARWIN"S RADIO it's only fair I also submit a book review for
someone to take a shot at.]
Last summer my wife and I took a vacation trip to Peru, a grand
adventure and educational experience which was made all the more
so by the heroic efforts of Marc Harrison of www.peruforless.com.
We learned how the Quechua people (that's their true name; they
call their leader "Inca") assimilated the Roman Catholic faith
into their own religion. For example, they accepted Mary as an
appearance of their own "mother earth" goddess. Our local guides
would cross themselves three times whenever a volcano came into
view during our travels.
In THE MURDER ARTIST there's a similar, but different, connection
between Christianity and another religion. I might have found
this a little hard to accept were it not for our experience on
our trip through Peru.
In this novel John Case ties together some elements of magic with
both those religions. (The book's title is a little misleading,
perhaps intentionally so?) In the book the title character, the
bad-guy evil-doer, is a grand master magician. Or perhaps I
should say the bad guy is a grand "illusionist" because we all
know there's no such thing as true "magic" (except in Harry
Potter). Just how the bad guy does his magic is Revealed--the
central element of the story - and it's such a neat "trick" I was
surprised I'd never learned of it before.
THE MURDER ARTIST is John Case's fourth novel. His first was THE
GENESIS CODE, which came out before THE DA VINCI CODE, and which
I liked more than Dan Brown's book only because Brown's book
almost read like a sequel THE GENESIS CODE to me (it of course
wasn't). One little thing which I enjoy about Case's books is
that either the hero or the heroine, or both, put on their
running shoes to go out for some exercise sooner or later during
the story (because I'm a runner myself). Case's THE MURDER
ARTIST isn't up to his THE GENESIS CODE, but it's a good
"thriller" and a quick read. [-tr]
===================================================================
TOPIC: IN GOOD COMPANY (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is an amiable comedy-drama about corporate politics
and about personal relationships. Dennis Quaid plays the middle-
aged manager of the advertising department of a leading sports
magazine. A managerial shakeup demotes him and leaves him
working for a man about half his age with no experience at all.
But it is worse than that. The new boss is actually romantically
attracted to Quaid's daughter. The characterizations are fresh
and story is not the cliché one might expect. Even the view of
corporate life rings true. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
Dan Foreman (played by Dennis Quaid) is a somewhat complacent
middle-aged salesman of advertising space for a major sports
magazine. He has a casual approach to selling and to life. Then
in one day his world his rocked. His wife Ann (Marg Helgenberger
of CSI) tells him she is pregnant and it looks like at work he
will soon go from being laid back to being laid off. There has
been a major reorganization of his area and his job has been
given to a man about half his age, Carter Duryea (Topher Grace).
Duryea is a rising hot shot being "groomed" for bigger things.
He is coming off a major success, positioning cell phone to be
sold to children, and he is being given a plum by upper
management. The plum is, unfortunately, Dan Foreman's job. Dan
will report to Carter. Together they are assigned to liquidating
most of the department. Dan is asked to play in a world of
aggressive tactics. He envies Carter's youth--Carter is 26,
little more than half of Dan's age. Dan resents Carter's
political power. On the other hand Carter envies Dan his family.
Carter's marriage is dissolving and he is nearly friendless.
What Dan does not know, and what would infuriate him even more,
is that Dan's daughter Alex (Scarlett Johansson) and Carter are
attracted to each other. The result is a conflict of business
philosophies, of personalities, and of generations. We have a
personality dynamic that could have come from an M. C. Escher
painting. Carter is a success above Dan in the business world.
Dan is above his loyal and loving daughter Alex in the family.
But Alex seems to have it all over Carter in sophistication.
When they are together Carter is like a little boy and Alex is
unflappably suave.
The easy shot would be to make Carter a completely unsympathetic
character. But that is not the shot that writer/director Paul
Weitz (AMERICAN PIE, ABOUT A BOY) took. The viewer finds himself
sympathetic to both sides of the conflict. Carter is a sensitive
man and one who actually is well-intentioned. Sure, he would
like to be successful, but he lacks the killer instinct that so
many of his backers have. He is painfully aware that he is a
pawn carrying out orders that are hurting the people who work for
him. Against type he has become the corporate hatchet man. The
real power behind the hatchet is a legendary and ruthless tycoon,
Teddy K (Malcolm McDowell), for whom Dan and Carter and just
about everybody else works. Teddy K's name is spoken in hushed
tones in what outwardly is supposed to look like respect, but it
is really in fear and distaste. We see only his picture until
toward the end of the film. Then we see what he really is and
how he thinks. People who have not been in the corporate world
may think that his character is overstated. They would be wrong.
I can tell you that I have been in meetings with executives who
were Teddy K under a different name. His characterization is
entirely on-target and nearly letter perfect.
The characters and the story of IN GOOD COMPANY have qualities
not usually found in major studio productions these days. It is
a dependent film with the heart of an independent one. For my
tastes this is a film just about on a par with the perhaps over-
rated SIDEWAYS. I am impressed that Universal is back to making
some films that are not obvious candidates to be the big
blockbuster of the month. I rate IN GOOD COMPANY a +2 on the -4
to +4 scale or 7/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: AN ITALIAN ROMANCE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Sentimental but not otherwise very engaging story of a
love affair that spans many years. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10
AN ITALIAN ROMANCE is a slow and sentimental mood piece, the
story of a love affair between a man and a woman in Italy before
World War II. The man, we discover, is married with a child.
The woman has some secrets in her past. But they enjoy each
other's company. If that does not sound like a lot of plot,
there is a little more to the film but not much. This is not the
kind of film with which the viewer can expect a lot to happen.
This is a film for people who enjoy seeing attractive lovers
together and who like to listen to the romantic strains of an
orchestral score with a lot of stringed instruments. It is a sad
BRIEF ENCOUNTER sort of film except that the encounter is not
really brief at all.
Maya Sansa plays Maria, a lovely manicurist from Livorno.
Stefano Accorsi plays Giovanni who has soft, sensitive Italian
eyes. He works in a bank under a tyrannical manager who is able
to keep Giovanni from the army. This is a kind of film we do not
see that often any more. It is more a painting than modern
drama. It is a bittersweet woman's film of not much content and
of operatic pacing. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: 5 X 2 - CINQ FOIS DEUX (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: It is no longer particularly original to tell the story
of a doomed romantic relationship in sequences shown in reverse
order. This film has little to offer beyond that. Rating: 0 (-4
to +4) or 4/10
A rather uninteresting couple has an ill-fated love affair and
marriage. The story is told in five sequences. The gimmick--and
it is getting to be an over-familiar one--is that we see the
sequences in reverse chronological order. We start with Gilles
(Stéphane Freiss) and Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) being
divorced and hearing the terms. We see their marriage
dissolving. Eventually this section of the film is at an end and
we move back to a sequence late in their marriage. We continue
through four earlier sequences with the film showing them first
being attracted to each other. A sad story gets a happy ending
because the ending is really the beginning.
In another sense this film has a happy ending. These are two
attractive people, but beyond that we see no reason to want to
see them pass on their genes. There seems to be no depth to
either of them except for their interest in sex. There may be
dimension to them that we do not see, but how would we know?
These vacuous people probably get what they deserve at the
beginning of the film and we see no reason to lament it.
The popular music in the film is nice. The mechanism of showing
the scenes in reverse order is really the film's whole interest
value, but it is becoming a timeworn gimmick and this is one of
the least interesting films to use it. It goes back at least to
the 1983 film BETRAYAL, written by Harold Pinter. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Neal Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE was this month's science
fiction discussion group selection. This was chosen because we
all loved SNOW CRASH by Stephenson, but THE DIAMOND AGE was not
nearly as popular. Several people did not (could not?) finish
it, and of those who did, only one liked it. The main problem
people had in the reading was a combination of the sheer number
of new words or concepts thrown at the reader, and the oft-times
purposeful copying of ornate Victorian prose. As a sample of the
words, here's a list from just the first short chapter: mod
parlor, aero, 'sites, yuks, theezed, phased, acoustical array,
meedfeed, mediaglyphics, cine panes, racting grid, mediatron,
yuvree, decapped, electrostun, Cripplers, and Hellfires. Yes,
some can be decoded from context, but having to do so this
frequently resulting in a very "un-smooth" reading experience.
(A later Stephenson novel, CRYPTONOMICRON, is more readable, but
then I found the same problems with his "Baroque Cycle" as with
THE DIAMOND AGE. There is not a clear chronological progression
here in Stephenson's style.)
Newt Gingrich and William F. Forstchen's GRANT COMES EAST is the
middle book of a trilogy (assuming it ends at three) and suffers
from the usual flaws inherent in that position. But I didn't
much like the first one either, because it consisted almost
entirely of battle movements. Some may like this, but it's not
my cup of tea. On a more minor level, someone decided to use the
Presidential Seal to flag the sections centering on Lincoln, but
the Presidential Seal did not come into existence until
Rutherford B. Hayes--twenty years later. (The Great Seal of the
United States did exist in Lincoln's time, but did not say "Seal
of the President of the United States" around the border. It
also had the eagle facing towards its left until 1945, when it
was changed to regularize it with the Great Seal.) You may be
asking why I read this if I didn't like the first one. As a
Sidewise judge, I have to read whatever is eligible to give it a
fair chance.
Marvin Olasky's THE RELIGIONS NEXT DOOR (ISBN 0-805-54314-3)
purports to be a book explaining the major non-Christian
religions in the world/the United States. (The subtitle is "What
We Need to Know about Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam"--
and What Reporters Are Missing".) It is obviously aimed at a
Christian audience, and probably a conservative audience as well.
His format is two chapters each for Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism,
and Islam, then two chapters on how the media "gets it wrong."
But Judaism is not treated the same as the other three religions.
For the other three, Olasky spends the second chapter telling in
detail what is wrong with them (the caste system, too little
consideration of humans as divinely special, etc.). He often
does this from a specifically Christian perspective, such as in
the following: "Crucially, then, Islam does not acknowledge
original sin. Muslims say they revere the whole Bible, but when
it and the Quran are in conflict, they go with the Quran. That
means Muslims have a tendency to revere strong leaders who put
forth an image of perfection; Christians, realizing that all have
sinned and fall short of God's glory, tend to be skeptical." The
use of the word "realizing" implies that the Christian position
is the correct one. Note also that Judaism also does not
recognize original sin. But Olasky's second chapter on Judaism
is just a history of Judaism, not an examination of where Olasky
feels it fails, and I suspect even he would not claim that Jews
revere "strong leaders who put forth an image of perfection" any
more than Christians. (Olasky says in the Foreword that he was a
Jew converted to Christianity, so this may have affected his
writing, or Olasky may have decided that he could "get away with"
criticizing other religions in a way that he could not with
Judaism.) And for that matter, he doesn't note that although
Christians say they revere the Old Testament, when the Old
Testament and the New Testament are in conflict, they go with the
New.
And the complaints about the press are again of two natures. For
Judaism, his complaints are that the religious meaning of
holidays are ignored in favor of articles on (for example)
traditional foods, that liberal branches are given proportionally
more coverage than conservative, and that coverage of Messianiac
Judaism tends to be negative. For the other three, he also
complains about the superficiality of coverage, but in a reversal
says that the press is not critical enough of other religions,
and that it emphasizes only their positive aspects. (Even Olasky
notices this contradiction, and says, "[in] one sense the tough
... coverage of the Messianic Jewish controversy is a good sign--
if only reporters would do the same with other groups.") In
short, I was both disappointed and annoyed by this book, and not
just because I was not the target audience. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this
nation to ruin ... would be to permit it to
become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
--Theodore Roosevelt,
Autobiography, 1913