5G Security

In a recent Analysts Meeting reported by Total Telecom, Verizon is noted as:

“Verizon’s view of the role of 5G in its enterprise services portfolio goes several steps further. Its view is that with the advent of 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), along with SDN, video, security telematics, and edge computing, will expand to become a foundational enabler of the real-time enterprise (RTE), in which businesses can exploit information, actions and events the moment they occur," 

Now I am a strong promoter of wireless and 5G, whatever it turns out to be when first out the gate provides a wireless Gbps platform which can be rapidly deployed.

However, and this is critical, there are two concerns.

1. Security: Unlike fiber which can be made physically secure, yet still subject to interjection physically, 5G wireless opens itself up to massive interdiction via sophisticated jamming. It is highly vulnerable and if one were ask an investment back to move from fiber to 5G I suspect and I hope there would be a great deal of soul searching. The vulnerabilities of 5G are minion. This is not a marketing gimmick, it is a real full time job. Hopefully they have someone who can do this.

2. Functionality: Here I fault Verizon for not addressing a simple problem. Namely in their current 4G system they "sell" a 4G replacement for a wireline phone. EXCEPT! It is NOT a replacement. It is a spit and bailing wire design that fails to replicate what the wireline phone does. No 911, no caller ID, one phone or extension per 4G unit, etc. Whoever designed this should be sent back to the minors, or worse. But this is a harbinger of what can happen in 5G, but many times worse. Verizon in my experience lacks the competence in blending technology and marketing into product design. It is outsourced and thus they rely on the "kindness of strangers" to get it right. This may be a bump in the road for residential users but it could be a business killer for the high end business.

 One can say, enough with the buzz words from the pitch masters and try to adhere to the old dictum; if all else fails listen to the customer!

Chaplains

I spent some decades on and off at MIT, even got married there. But never met any chaplain. The minister at our wedding was a local we got to meet. From across the river in Back Bay.

But now MIT appoints a Chaplain to the Institute. I do not have any horse in this race, but it is amazing that this appears to be another high level employee along with a slew of others. One wonders why the tuition keeps expanding. One could guess that with all the churches and synagogues in and around the Institute that one could find a place for worship and solace and not have to add substantially to the head count.

It is quite obvious to see how explosive the growth of non academic sinecures have been at MIT and elsewhere.

I guess no one goes to Mass barefoot in the ice and snow during Lent anymore.

Obesity and Error; A Tale of Political Correctness gone Astray

In a long piece in what seems in my opinion to have become the world's paper of scientific record, The Huffington Post, a major contribution to humanity brought to you by Verizon, is a lengthy article on obesity, and apparently why all of science and medicine are in error[1]. Now the current view is that for the most part, significant endocrine pathologies excluded, obesity is a simple input less output issue. Eat more, burn less, gain weight. Second, obesity triggers a plethora of cell pathway damages and assaults, including but not limited to an explosion of reactive oxygen species. We have written about this extensively[2].

One simple and continuously provable result is in Type 2 diabetes. Drop the BMI below say 23 and the HbA1c drops back to a normal range below 5.5. The net result is the sequella common in that disease also often disappear. That is just one provable example.

In the UK a recent report by Cancer Research UK notes[3]:

And if these trends in the number of cases caused by these risk factors continue, overweight and obesity could overtake smoking as the biggest preventable cause of cancer in women by 2043. While the gap between obesity and tobacco as causes of cancer in men is also expected to narrow in the next 20 years, there’s still a way to go before they cross over. And it’s too soon to estimate when this might happen. The crossover is likely to happen earlier in women for two reasons. First, more men smoke than women. And that means there are more smoking-related cancers in men. In 2015, 18% of cancer cases in men were caused by smoking, compared with just 12% in women. And while men are also more likely to be overweight or obese than women, obesity has a bigger effect on women in terms of cancer. Some of the most common types of cancer caused by obesity are breast and womb cancer, which predominantly affect women.

The writer in the above mentioned Huffington Post peer reviewed (?) scientific article goes at length to argue that obesity is not self-inflicted and that obese people are more often healthier than those of lesser girth. That would be just fine if and only if the clear and demonstrable costs of obesity were not borne primarily by those who themselves struggle to maintain a reasonable weight and avoid the multiplicity of sequella to high BMI. Frankly if health care costs were borne by each individual as they occur to that individual, and there is no secondary effect of their behavior on others, no externalities so to speak, then frankly anyone should be able to do anything. Unfortunately the same people demand Medicare for all, as such those costs would explode.

The same people who felt no compunction to shaming smokers, a truly valuable action considering the decline in death rates in males, seem now to think any form of negative connotations regarding an often self-inflicted condition which also all too often results in massive health care costs, borne by all, is not only socially unacceptable but tantamount to criminal. Furthermore, like so many of the "unacceptable" position it is also worthy of assault on those who demur.

We seem to entering a generation tsunami where what one says must be true no matter what and facts be damned. Even more so, anyone who dares to use science and facts, other than to reinforce the position of the week is anathema.

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[1] https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265206539_Obesity_and_Type_2_Diabetes_Cause_and_Effect?_sg=dV5aHikCis5L_AYSHTRyuj_b-tWIxvaMa1jvpPEMWpPKO8anCOj4WS4T9Q26u9sism0fkWnpz01s3jTVOjPuRE5TDL4IqU_KsFuM-AIu.TlZzoo4W12VLPWh26RtmAlF8uXfC1cSrSw7dydyhHxvOLMRTn_ZvcZsU8Dwlg4t8SqXkvZ-jamlOnKAhrj7mpQ

[3] https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2018/09/24/how-we-estimated-when-obesity-might-catch-smoking-as-the-top-cause-of-cancer/

Why Does Dell Make It So Hard to Buy Something?

I have been buying Dell Computers since they started selling, very early 1990s. We have had hundreds and hundreds over the years. As a business customer you have to go to a business line. But that you get to via their normal line.

Now here is the problem.

1. All customer services now use IP telephony. Sorry but I started this some 25 years ago globally, and I presented a paper some 20 years ago in Italy about the poor quality of IP voice. Well it has just gotten worse. Really, old copper had great voice quality. The old Bell System was proud of that. Then came the Internet and digitized compressed voice.

2. Then add to this the fact that they must outsource everything to India. Add the packet delay, to the voice compression, to the accent, to the lack of understanding of English, to the fact that they use scripts...well you see where I am going.

3. After a long period it became clear I could not buy a computer from them, I had to wait till a week day and speak with the business sales.

4. I sent an email asking what number and when to call, this is what I received:

***THIS IS AN AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED ACKNOWLEDGEMENT - - DO NOT REPLY***
Thank you for contacting Dell's Pre-Sales Support. We've received your message and look forward to serving you!

 5. Got it folks, but who do I call and when to get served? Really, no clue from this message.

I do not think Dell really wants to sell anything, at least to the small business person. Over the years we spent about $20 million but to Dell we must be a pimple of the ... of eternity to get their attention. Hopefully someone is home there at sometime. 

I just want to buy something folks! Hello, anyone there?

Some Thoughts from Alice in Wonderland

'No, no!' said the Queen. 

'Sentence first—verdict afterwards.' 

'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!' 

'Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple. 

'I won't!' said Alice. 

'Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. 

Nobody moved. 

'Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.)

'You're nothing but a pack of cards!' 

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

Gallicanism Redux

Gallicanism is the practice of the French selecting their own bishops. Henry VIII had two beefs with Rome. One was a succession issue, related to his first marriage, an issue oftentimes taken care of by Rome in a slight of hand, and the second was the fact that Rome controlled the Church in England but allowed the French to do whatever they liked. Gallicanism if you will, albeit a stretch.

Back when Gregory I became Bishop of Rome he was elected by the people of Rome, despite his protests. There were no cardinals and in fact Gregory was subservient to the Emperor in Constantinople.

Then along came a variety of Popes who created cardinals, often not even priests, but princes of the Church, who got the exclusive right to elect the Bishop of Rome, who in the 14th century lived in Avignon, having been expelled by the people of Rome. Strange tale.

But for the past centuries Papal authority ruled and Rome and the Pope selected and elevated bishops, and cardinals. Gallicanism was obliterated during Vatican I.

Now comes China. The NY Times reports:

The Vatican said Saturday that it had reached a provisional deal with the Chinese government to end a decades-old power struggle over the authority to appoint bishops in China. It was the Communist country’s first formal recognition of the pope as leader of the Roman Catholic Church in the world’s most populous nation, Vatican officials said. Under the breakthrough, Pope Francis recognized the legitimacy of seven bishops appointed by the Chinese government. Because they had not been selected by the Vatican, they had previously been excommunicated. The deal was in keeping with pope’s outreach to parts of the world where he hopes to increase the church’s presence and spread its message. It gives the church greater access to a huge population where the growth of Protestantism is far outpacing Catholicism. But for critics loath to share any of the church’s authority with an authoritarian government, the deal marked a shameful retreat and the setting of a dangerous precedent for future relations with other countries.

Is this truly a bad situation? Frankly from history's perspective, one could say so. People choosing their own bishops was not a bad idea. It was democratic. Popes selecting them was a remnant of divine right of Kings. Nations having a say, one could note, led to revolutions, specifically the French Revolution, not to mention Henry VIII, and even Martin Luther.

 It will be interesting to see how this one is justified. But perhaps for the papacy, consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds, kind of.

What is the Internet?

In 1990 I wrote a paper looking at what was then called NREN, and now the Internet at Harvard. It Audiencedescribed what I had been working on at MIT and NYNEX, now Verizon, and before that at COMSAT, the ARPA Net, as a distributed open network.

Then in 2000, as I was building our my Internet backbone company in 20 countries I was Vice Chair of a National Academy Study on the future of the Internet. Eric Schmidt was Chair.  As I note then,

The Internet is a composite of tens of thousands of individually owned and operated networks that are interconnected, providing the user with the illusion that they are a single network. A customer who purchases Internet service is actually purchasing service from a particular Internet service provider (ISP) connected to this network of networks. The ISP in turn enters into business arrangements for connectivity with other service providers to ensure that the customer’s data can move smoothly among the various parts of the Internet. The networks that make up the Internet are composed of communications links, which carry data from one point to another, and routers, which direct the communications flow between links and thus, ultimately, from senders to receivers. Communications links to users may employ different communications media, from telephone lines to cables originally deployed for use in cable television systems to satellite and other wireless circuits. Internal to networks, especially larger networks, are links—typically optical fiber cables—that can carry relatively large amounts of traffic. The largest of these links are commonly said to make up the Internet’s “backbone,” although this definition is not precise and even the backbone is not monolithic.

Namely the Internet as we understand it and use it is merely an agreement on the use of the TCP/IP protocols. Local ISPs connect us up the chain eventually to a Tier 1 carrier who peers with others allowing ultimately universal connection. Now anyone can do the same thing but not allow universal interconnection. It is called using a Firewall. The Chinese use it all the time. I suspect this Blog is firewalled. As is I suspect many of my papers as are other academic papers.

In that report we further noted:

• “Hourglass” architecture. The Internet is designed to operate over different underlying communications technologies, including those yet to be introduced, and to support multiple and evolving applications and services. It does not impede or restrict particular applications (although users and ISPs may make optimizations reflecting the requirements of particular applications or classes of applications). Such an architecture enables people to write applications that run over it without knowing details about the configuration of the networks over which they run and without involving the network operators. This critical separation between the network technology and the higher-level services through which users actually interact with the Internet can be visualized as an hourglass, in which the narrow waist represents the basic network service provided by the Internet and the wider regions above and below represent the applications and underlying communications technologies, respectively.

• End-to-end architecture. Edge-based innovation derives from an early fundamental design decision that the Internet should have an end-to-end architecture. The network, which provides a  communications fabric connecting the many computers at its ends, offers a very basic level of service, data transport, while the intelligence, the information processing needed to provide applications, is located in or close to the devices attached to the edge of the network.

• Scalability. The Internet’s design enables it to support a growing amount of communications—growth in the number of users and attached devices and growth in the volume of communications per device and in total, properties referred to as “scale.” Nonetheless, as is discussed below, the Internet currently faces and will continue to face scaling challenges that will require significant effort by those who design and operate it.

• Distributed design and decentralized control. Control of the network (from the standpoint of, for instance, how data packets are routed through the Internet) is distributed except for a few key  functions, namely, the allocation of address blocks and the management of top-level domain names in the Domain Name System. No single entity (organization, corporation, or government body) controls the Internet in its entirety.

Now Schmidt makes the news stating:

"I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America. If you look at China, and I was just there, the scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal. Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number.  If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're good with the Internet,' you're missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc. Look at the way BRI works – their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries – it's perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom."

Then is it an Internet? It lacks the above characterizations. It may be a large but private network where one must play by a certain set of rules. There is no CCITT entity like the old telephone networks. Yes you can have a closed network. In fact that is what we should have for banks, power utilities and the like. But then it is not the Internet.

We show this below. If the router tables are controlled and elimited and if the Tier 1 is also blocked to other Tier 1 networks then one cannt get anywhere but to an approved site. Simple.

In fact DoD has just such a network. It carries DoD traffic. It has done so since the mid 1980s.

Thus is this some new insight? Hardly. It is what you would expect from a Totalitarian state. Even Russia has a bifurcated network, and I assume that China does already. The Internet is an architecture, a way for building. Its embodiment may be open to all or open to a few. It really was never made to be secure, quite the contrary. If one had access then one had access. However getting access can be made non-trivial.

Therefore, we should expect, and in some cases such as banking and utilities, a multiplicity of "Internets". Some quite secure and one or more fully open. There is no surprise there at all.

Academics and the Abstract

In a recent piece in The Tech, the MIT student newspaper, they note:

Principal Investigator of the Geometric Data Processing Group at MIT, is a prominent member of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG), a cohort of Boston-based computer scientists and mathematicians that are leveraging modern computing power to study the problem of fairness in redistricting with a level of quantitative rigor that has not been possible until recently. “From my perspective, one of the big challenges in redistricting is that we lack clear, quantitative standards for evaluating the fairness of redistricting plans”.... “For that reason, there’s no clear path to a standard that’s easily enforceable and understandable.”... “Our effort, broadly, is… to assemble a clear set of standards and a way to talk about the redistricting problem in a fashion that’s quantitate and that’s fair and easy to apply,” he told The Tech. “That includes a lot of different aspects. Everything from understanding the shape of a district and what bearing it has on the outcome of the vote… to understanding the big space of all the different ways of dividing up a state.”

A laudable goal but it all seems to hinge on the definition of fair. Somehow this group knows what "fair" means and they have some algorithm to ascertain such.  This is akin to defining "justice" an argument that has befuddled philosophers and political and legal scholars for thousands of years. But not to worry, these folks have the answer, just trust the.

Is then no wonder that most people look askance at these "academics". The key reason is that there is a gross lack of reason in my opinion. My fairness most likely is not your fairness. As we see in today's vitriolic politics, fair for me is not fair for you, and whatever!

Words mean something.