We Live In The Future

I grew up on science fiction.  I loved reading stories of The Future, where space travel was commonplace, where all energy was generated cleanly, and where we worked side-by-side with machine intelligences to accomplish tasks.

Of course, that wasn’t what most of the books were about; space travel, clean energy, and A.I. were just part of the background.  And many of the books I read had issues– most of them failed to properly predict the role that women play in society (or often failed to credit them at all, aside from being a love interest for the hero), quite a few were somewhat racist, and all of them glossed over problems of everyday life that couldn’t simply be resolved with technology– but in the background areas of space travel, A.I., and clean energy, they were quite prescient.

“But Ryan, none of those have happened yet,” I hear you saying.  And you’re right, none of these have yet reached their full potential.  But in a world where SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Labs, Virgin Galactic, and so many others are all working to bring affordable spaceflight to the masses (and getting pretty darn close), I think it’s safe to say that space travel will soon1 become far more commonplace than it is today.  We won’t be living in Star Trek, but costs will come down and won’t be the same barrier that they are today.

And in a world where renewable energy continues to make great strides, I think it’s safe for me to predict that we are well on the way to moving the bulk of our electrical generation away from fossil fuels– there are some problems to solve with electrical transmission and energy storage, but we keep moving closer to to a solution.  As more companies compete for a slice of the renewable energy pie, prices will go down, efficiency will go up, and an increasing percentage of electrical generation will be from renewable resources.  Energy will increasingly be stored in batteries of one kind or another, whether they be chemical (such as Tesla’s Powerpacks), mechanical (such as hydropower or compressed air), or thermal (such as molten salt paired with a concentrated solar tower).  Those batteries will allow more and more of the baseload supply of energy to come from renewables, reducing dependence on fossil fuels, and paving the way for those to be slowly phased out.

Lastly, we already work incredibly closely with machine intelligences, though that intelligence isn’t quite what was predicted (at least, not yet).  Work is increasingly done on computers with incredibly complicated error checking algorithms, designed to reduce mistakes that cost money and lives.  Our data is sorted and analyzed by powerful computers that can correlate information thousands of times faster than we can, letting us build more complicated and accurate models to help us learn even more about the world we live in.  And most impressively (for me), we can now literally talk to our computers and ask them to do things for us.  I know that the first two examples are far more impactful to society, but I still can’t quite believe that I can just talk to my Google Home, have it correctly interpret what I’m asking for, and then give me an answer that makes sense and fulfills my need.  It still feels like magic.

The science fiction writers I read in my youth may have written about a world that was full of more straightforward adventure than the one we live in today.  But what our world lacks in swashbuckling heroes with laser swords, it more than makes up for with the amount of sheer technical wonder that we have at our fingertips each day.  Fifty years ago, for me to write and publish this article would have required a bulky typewriter, a mimeograph machine to create copies of the typed article, a bunch of paper, and a stapler to staple my article up on random light poles for people to read.  Today, I wrote most of this post on my Chromebook connected to the hotspot on my phone, while waiting for my car’s inspection to be finished.  To publish it, I hit the big blue “publish” button at the top of the page, and trusted it would be sent out to your screen when you wanted to read it.  The amount of time and effort saved by modern technology for this article alone could probably cover my grocery bill for a week.  And if that’s not evidence of us living in the future, I don’t know what is.

Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

  1. Assuming a generous definition of “soon”

Moving to Ubiquiti Unifi






The UniFi Dashboard






Listing image by Thomas Jensen on Unsplash

It’s always DNS





Format Aside

A new reflection attack was unveiled today which can increase the size of a DDoS attack by 51,000-fold.  It uses memcached, an object caching system designed to speed up web applications, to amplify attacks against a target.  This represents a substantial increase from previous attacks, which have used network time servers to amplify attacks 58-fold and DNS servers to amplify attacks 50-fold.

Attacks seen this week have surpassed 500 Gbps, which is pretty amazing considering only a small percentage of publicly-available memcached servers are being used to launch those attacks.  It’ll be interesting to see if any larger attacks are launched in the coming weeks… and what their targets will be.

The article over at Ars Technica is pretty good, and is worth a read.

Format Aside



Format Aside




Format Aside

I’ve noticed a growing trend in more advanced computer users lately: some of them have begun advocating against using antivirus software.  Instead, they suggest using browser extensions like uBlock Origin (which I use and recommend), combined with safe browsing practices, to remove the need for antivirus software altogether.  Ars Technica did a very nice write-up on this trend today, and it’s worth a look.

For what it’s worth, I still use Avast as an antivirus package.  But it hasn’t alerted me to any issues or found any viruses in at least a year, so perhaps it’s time to consider freeing up some memory on my computer.

New Host!










Lesson learned!

Photo credit Torkild Retvedt.

Format Aside

Ars Technica did a nice job of creating an impartial write-up on why Hillary Clinton used an external email server, and how it was actually used.  It sounds to me like there’s an institutional history of using private email to conduct business, largely due to obstructive or incompetent IT services (in fairness to the State Department IT team, there are likely a number of complicated policies and legal requirements that they’re trying to work around, which is difficult).  Still, that’s not an excuse to use a home server to manage official communication– if you must use your own email address, at least use something like Google Apps or Microsoft Exchange Online, where you have teams of people professionally managing the email environment 1.

It’s also interesting to see that the NSA basically shot down any possibility of her getting a secured mobile device; I would have thought that providing the Secretary of State– the person who comes fourth in the presidential line of succession– with secure communications at all time would be a priority for them.

You can read the full story here.

  1. Of course, there is still the issue of all email traffic being unsecured and transmitted in plaintext.  But you could use a PGP solution to reduce risks there.

Uncertainty, the Fed, and the Economy

The New York Times published this opinion piece recently, discussing the Fed’s continuing decision to delay raising rates.  While the entire article is interesting, I believe that the final paragraph is the most insightful:

Adding to the frustration is that Fed policy is not to blame for the economy’s underperformance. Congress bears much of the blame because of its tightfisted federal budgets when more government spending is needed to offset feeble spending and investment in the private sector. Still, sound policy making by the Fed requires answering to conditions as they are, not as policy makers might wish they were.

Right now, we should be spending money to stimulate the economy– cutting back is incredibly short-sighted, and could seriously damage the economy.  We should look back at other economic downturns from the past– the Great Depression, for example, was ended not by restricting government spending, but by massively increasing it (and by abolishing the gold standard, which let to the restriction in the first place)– and learn from them.  Economists have studied recessions for many years, and the Fed has done an admirable job in regulating the U.S. economy through this entire mess.  Politicians, however, often don’t understand the data, or are politically unable to make the best long-term policy.  For this reason, they should seek to reduce uncertainty in U.S. markets.
Economic uncertainty is a larger problem in the United States than we may care to admit.  John C. Williams, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, gave a 2012 speech in which he said that uncertainty was one of the largest problems facing the U.S. economy today:

By almost any measure, uncertainty is high. Businesses are uncertain about the economic environment and the direction of economic policy. Households are uncertain about job prospects and future incomes. Political gridlock in Washington, D.C., and the crisis in Europe add to a sense of foreboding. I repeatedly hear from my business contacts that these uncertainties are prompting them to slow investment and hiring. As one of them put it, uncertainty is causing firms to “step back from the playing field.” Economists at the San Francisco Fed calculate that uncertainty has reduced consumer and business spending so much that it has potentially added a full percentage point to the unemployment rate.

Obviously, with unemployment at 5.0% today,1 having uncertainty raise the unemployment a full percentage point is no small matter.  And on average, economic uncertainty is increasing—according to data collected by Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis in “Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty” over at PolicyUncertainty.com, economic uncertainty has been trending upwards for the past fifteen years.

A chart showing the rate of economic uncertainty, along with an upwards trend line, between April 2001 and April 2016.Obviously, this trend is heavily influenced by the 2008 recession, but I find it interesting that it may be beginning to rise again.  This is possibly a result of the fluctuating oil markets, combined with the slowdown of China’s economy; but no matter the cause both the Fed and the government should seek to reduce uncertainty and continue to promote stability in the economy.

Listing image by William Warby.

  1. When he gave that speech, the unemployment rate was at 8.3%, and the Economic Uncertainty Index (EUI) was at 178.3; today the latest numbers for the EUI place the United States near 98.3.  I was unable to find any data correlating the EUI with specific unemployment rates, so at this time I cannot estimate how much of our present unemployment is a result of uncertainty in the economy.
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