Monthly Archives: October 2010

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The Flash Crash and the trouble with transparency

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A report at Ars Technica compares the computerised financial markets to a vast and infernally complex piece of multi-threaded software running on hardware that was never designed to cope with it (or vice versa), before telling us what I suspect most of us have already guessed: it’s a gigantic house of electronic cards. But ironically enough, part of the problem stems from the very transparency that the shift to electronic trading was supposed to bring with it:

Unlike the market of an earlier era, where humans executed trades by talking to (and shouting at) one another, the electronic communication networks (ECNs) that emerged in the late 70s logged every detail of every trade for later auditing. No more “he said, she said” when resolving a dispute or ferreting out fraud—just go to the tape. But then came the flood.

After a solid decade of moving almost all trading activity onto electronic systems (the NYSE floor is just there for show at this point), the market generates so much data that it’s nearly impossible for a mere governmental agency like the SEC to analyze. There are literally tens of thousands of quotes per second in hundreds of thousands of symbols across multiple electronic exchanges—the SEC would need the brain and computer power of the NSA to even begin to do a credible job of crunching this many numbers for a credible post mortem.

[…]

The amount of data isn’t just a problem for regulators. Much of the report details how the systems of the market participants were themselves overwhelmed in real-time with the sudden surge of digital information. Processing began to slow, queues filled, backlogs developed, and machines were eventually pulled offline as the humans intervened and tried to sort out possible data integrity issues.

Beyond the challenges of reconstructing events, the traders also use some subset of the data firehose that the market’s machines throw off today as input to train the algorithms that will run the market tomorrow. So at some point, we’ll wake up and realize that it’s really turtles machines all the way down. Put that in your bong and smoke it, Keanu.

Ouch. And it gets worse, too; go read the whole thing. I think the best way to sum it up in layman’s terms is that we’ve turned the financial markets into something a little like one of those “game of life” software ecosystems… which would be quite a fascinating idea if it weren’t for the fact that unexpected interactions within that ecosystem can affect meatspace in a pretty serious way.

The more I learn about derivatives and futures and all that “clever” quant stuff, the more I think it’s a bunch of hubristic mathematical voodoo bullshit that we’d do well to get shot of sooner rather than later; the only people it really seems to benefit are the wankers who thought it all up in the first place.

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Stopping dengue with mosquito parasites

A while back we had a brief look at the possibility of simply excising mosquitoes from the ecosystems in which they are most problematic, but now an Australian scientist is trying a different tack in order to curtail the spreading range of the dengue fever virus: mosquitoes infected with a particular bacterium are less able to host the dengue virus and live only half as long, so introducing them into dengue zones should see them rapidly out-compete the dengue carriers. Sounds a lot less drastic than trying for wholesale eradication of a species…

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What we know and what we assume: Schneier on Stuxnet

Bruce Schneier has a good round-up of the hard facts about the Stuxnet worm (as mentioned previously), as well as an examination of how those hard facts – combined with a few very speculative conspiracy-theory-grade interpretations of some of the more cryptic and tiny facts – have led to the current state of the story in mainstream (i.e. non-techie) media, namely “it was probably an Israeli job”.

Best I can tell, this rumor was started by Ralph Langner, a security researcher from Germany. He labeled his theory “highly speculative,” and based it primarily on the facts that Iran had an usually high number of infections (the rumor that it had the most infections of any country seems not to be true), that the Bushehr nuclear plant is a juicy target, and that some of the other countries with high infection rates–India, Indonesia, and Pakistan–are countries where the same Russian contractor involved in Bushehr is also involved. This rumor moved into the computer press and then into the mainstream press, where it became the accepted story, without any of the original caveats.

Once a theory takes hold, though, it’s easy to find more evidence. The word “myrtus” appears in the worm: an artifact that the compiler left, possibly by accident. That’s the myrtle plant. Of course, that doesn’t mean that druids wrote Stuxnet. According to the story, it refers to Queen Esther, also known as Hadassah; she saved the Persian Jews from genocide in the 4th century B.C. “Hadassah” means “myrtle” in Hebrew.

Stuxnet also sets a registry value of “19790509” to alert new copies of Stuxnet that the computer has already been infected. It’s rather obviously a date, but instead of looking at the gazillion things–large and small–that happened on that the date, the story insists it refers to the date Persian Jew Habib Elghanain was executed in Tehran for spying for Israel.

Sure, these markers could point to Israel as the author. On the other hand, Stuxnet’s authors were uncommonly thorough about not leaving clues in their code; the markers could have been deliberately planted by someone who wanted to frame Israel. Or they could have been deliberately planted by Israel, who wanted us to think they were planted by someone who wanted to frame Israel. Once you start walking down this road, it’s impossible to know when to stop.

Are those mysterious little comments in the code the flourished signatures of master cyberwar artistes? Or a frame-job packed with credible deniability? Or an elaborate double (or triple) bluff? Truth of the matter is, we’re all just guessing. They say that life sometimes imitates art; this is a case of life imitating The Illuminatus! Trilogy, only without so many puns or sex scenes. We all have a story we want to map on to the world, and it only takes a few pins to tack it down in a way that seems to explain everything…

[ * For the record, my instinct tells me – with admittedly very little professional knowledge to back it up – that Stuxnet stinks of nation-state vs. nation-state, and I get the impression Schneier thinks so too. His point is about how we treat speculative interpretations as givens when they match up with the way we already think things work… confirmation bias, in other words. ]

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Charlie Stross on the economic naivete of science fiction

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The Strossmeister crops up in a brief interview at New Scientist*, and says the following:

Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak which I think is like a crude Leninism. That’s attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect. Except that we have to assume perfectly uniform and spherical humans of a fixed density for it to work. Humans are complex and if you show them a system, a subset of them will try to game the system for their own benefits. I’ve seen a joking case made that Star Trek‘s Federation is propaganda from a communist dictatorship; they have no money and have replicators to provide everything. But behind the gleaming shiny space ships is a howling vacuum of no explanation.

I think we’re starting to see a move away from that situation, at least in (some) written sf – Stross himself, plus Doctorow, Ken MacLeod, Karl Schroeder, Bruce Sterling and others, they’re all trying to engage those economic realities and make them part of the story. Problem is that economics is an inherently politicised subject, so one reader’s engagement with reality will be another reader’s naive socialist utopia (or libertarian paradise, or, or, or…). You can’t please all the people all the time, after all… and I rather suspect it’s that underlying naive utopianism of Trek that has leant it such lasting appeal.

[ * OK, so it’s a very brief interview, but even so, was “SF author: I am a spaceman” the best pull-quote the NS sub-ed could come up with? Really? ]

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Heavy metal spec fic

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Every now and again, my two great loves – loud guitar music and speculative fiction – collide in interesting ways. Witness io9’s piece on the latest album by Texan retro-metallers The Sword, which is a concept album of the old school, based on an unpublished story written by frontman J D Cronise. (The Sword, incidentally, are a superb live act; if you’ve any love for heavy metal whatsoever, be sure to go see them play if you get the chance.)

Science fiction and rock music have always been connected to some degree, but in my experience people tend to assume that their explicit linkage died off around the same time as the dinosaurs of the original Seventies progressive movement. (The heavier types of metal, largely due to the formative work of the mighty Black Sabbath, have tended to cleave to imagery that is more easily classified as horror or “dark fantasy”… always assuming that one can come to any sort of universally-agreeable definition of what either of those terms actually mean.) As mentioned a while ago, Jason Heller had a great essay at Clarkesworld that considered a whole batch of rock albums as science fiction texts, and it neatly puts the lie to the notion of an epoch of disconnection between the two spheres (though I’d argue that Heller ventures way outside the confines of what I’d define as “rock”, though that’s far less a judgement of value than one of aesthetics on my part.)

And out in the musical hinterlands, science fiction and rock music are still finding ways to connect to each other – something I’m fortunate enough to be well-placed to observe in my capacity as an independent reviewer of (often extremely) marginal musics. For example, only a few days back I was listening to a band called Constants, whose final song on their second album was entitled “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” (PKD titles are one of the most consistent reference points for modern bands, in my experience).

Then there’s the mighty Clutch, whose bluesy roadhouse-rawk references sf ideas and texts with almost frivolous abandon when the mood takes them (try “Escape From The Prison Planet“, or “The Rapture of Riddley Walker“, if you can cope with the horrible bandwidth and quality of live footage on YouTube). And I never tire of extolling the virtues of Manchester’s very own Amplifier, who have the rare knack of catching the epic scale and sensawunda of space opera in their sprawling and slightly proggy compositions – in fact, when I guested at Philip Palmer’s blog a while ago, I plucked out their majestic “UFOs” for appreciation by a wider audience. Go have a listen.

Music, after all, is another form of storytelling (and arguably a much older one than the novel and short story), so it should come as no surprise that the ideas and imagery of science fiction appear there, too. What sf-nal musics are lurking on your Generic Digital Music Playback Device, rock or otherwise? Call ’em out in the comments; maybe we’ll all find something fresh to listen to. 🙂