Common passwords are bad ... by definition

It's that time of the year again, time for the annual lists of worst passwords.  Top of at least one list: 123456, followed by password.  It just goes to show how people never change.  Silly people!

Except ...

A good password has a very high chance of being unique, because a good password is selected randomly from a very large space of possible passwords.  If you pick your password at random from a trillion possibilities*, then the odds that a particular person who did the same also picked your password are one in a trillion, the odds that one of a million other such people picked your password are about one in a million, as are the odds that any particular two people picked the same password.  If a million people used the same scheme as you did, there's a good chance that some pair of them accidentally share a password, but almost certainly almost all of those passwords are unique.

If you count up the most popular passwords in this idealized scenario of everyone picking a random password out of a trillion possibilities, you'll get a fairly tedious list:

• 1: some string of random gibberish, shared by two people
• 2 - 999,999: Other strings of random gibberish, 999,998 in all

Now suppose that seven people didn't get the memo.  Four of them choose 123456 and three of them choose password.  The list now looks like

• 1: 123456,  shared by four people
• 2: password,  shared by three people
• 3: some string of random gibberish, shared by two people
• 4-999,994:  Other strings of random gibberish, 999,991 in all

Those seven people are pretty likely to have their passwords hacked, but overall password hygiene is still quite good -- 99.9993% of people picked a good password.  It's certainly better than if 499,999 people picked 123456 and 499,998 picked password, two happened to pick the same strong password and the other person picked a different strong password, even though the resulting rankings are the same as above.

Likewise, if you see a list of 20 worst passwords taken from 5 million leaked passwords, that could mean anything from a few hundred people having picked bad passwords to everyone having done so.  It would be more interesting to report how many people picked popular passwords as opposed to unique ones, but that doesn't seem to make its way into the "wow, everyone's still picking bad passwords" stories.

From what I was able to dig up, that portion is probably around 10%.  Not great, but not horrible, and probably less than it was ten years ago.  But as long as some people are picking bad passwords, the lists will stay around and the headlines will be the same, regardless of whether most people are doing a better job.

(I would have provided a link for that 10%, but the site I found it on had a bunch of broken links and didn't seem to have a nice tabular summary of bad passwords vs other passwords from year to year, so I didn't bother)

*A password space of a trillion possibilities is actually pretty small.  Cracking passwords is roughly the same problem as the hash-based proof-of-work that cyrptocurrencies use.  Bitcoin is currently doing around 100 million trillion hashes per second, or a trillion trillion hashes every two or three hours.  The Bitcoin network isn't trying to break your password, but it'll do for estimating purposes.  If you have around 100 bits of entropy, for example if you choose a random sequence of fifteen capital and lowercase letters, digits and 30 special characters, it would take a password-cracking network comparable to the Bitcoin network around 400 years to guess your password.  That's probably good enough.  By that time, password cracking will probably have advanced far beyond where we are and, who knows, maybe we'll have stopped using passwords by then.

Software cities

In the previous post I stumbled on the idea that software projects are like cities.  The more I thought about it, I said, the more I liked the idea.  Now that I've had some more time to think about it, I like the idea even more, so I'd like to try to draw the analogy out a little bit further, ideally not past the breaking point.

What first drew me to the concept was realizing that software projects, like cities, are neither completely planned nor completely unplanned.  Leaving aside the question of what level of planning is best -- which surely varies -- neither of the extremes is likely to actually happen in real life.

If you try to plan every last detail, inevitably you run across something you didn't anticipate and you'll have to adjust.  Maybe it turns out that the place you wanted to put the city park is prone to flooding, or maybe you discover that the new release of some platform your depending doesn't actually support what you thought it did, or at least not as well as you need it to.

Even if you could plan out every last detail of a city, once people start living in it, they're going to make changes and deviate from your assumptions.  No one actually uses that beautiful new footbridge, or if they do, they cut across a field to get to it and create a "social trail" thereby bypassing the carefully designed walkways.  People start using an obscure feature of one of the protocols to support a use case the designers never thought of.  Cities develop and evolve over time, with or without oversight, and in software there's always a version 2.0 ... and 2.1, and 2.2, and 2.2b (see this post for the whole story).

On the other hand, even if you try to avoid planning and let everything "just grow", planning happens anyway.  If nothing else, we codify patterns that seem to work -- even if they arose organically with no explicit planning -- as customs and traditions.

In a distant time in the Valley, I used to hear the phrase "paving the cow paths" quite a bit.  It puzzled me at first.  Why pave a perfectly good cow path?  Cattle are probably going to have a better time on dirt, and that pavement probably isn't going to hold up too well if you're marching cattle on it all the time ...  Eventually I came to understand that it wasn't about the cows.  It was about taking something that people had been doing already and upgrading the infrastructure for it.  Plenty of modern-day highways (or at least significant sections of them) started out as smaller roads which in turn used to be dirt roads for animals, foot traffic and various animal-drawn vehicles.

Upgrading a road is a conscious act requiring coordination across communities all along the roadway.  Once it's done, it has a significant impact on communities on the road, which expect to benefit from increased trade and decreased effort of travel, but also communities off the road, which may lose out, or may alter their habits now that the best way to get to some important place is by way of the main road and not the old route.  This sort of thing happens both inside and outside cities, but for the sake of the analogy think of ordinary streets turning into arterials or bypasses and ring roads diverting traffic around areas people used to have to cross through.

One analogue of this is in software is standards.  Successful standards tend to arise when people get together to codify existing practice, with the aim of improving support for things people were doing before the standard, just in a variety of similar but still needlessly different ways.  Basically pick a route and make it as smooth and accessible as possible.  This is a conscious act requiring coordination across communities, and once it's done it has a significant impact on the communities involved, and on communities not directly involved.

This kind of thing isn't always easy.  A business district thrives and grows, and more and more people want to get to it.  Traffic becomes intolerable and the city decides to develop a new thoroughfare to carry traffic more efficiently (thereby, if it all works, accelerating growth in the business district and increasing traffic congestion ...).  Unfortunately, there's no clear space for building this new thoroughfare.  An ugly political fight ensues over whose houses should get condemned to make way and eventually the new road is built, cutting through existing communities and forever changing the lives of those nearby.

One analog of this in software is the rewrite.  A rewrite almost never supports exactly the same features as the system being rewritten.  The reasons for this are probably material for a separate post,  but the upshot is that some people's favorite features are probably going to break with the rewrite, and/or be replaced by something different that the developers believe will solve the same problem in a way compatible with the new system.  Even if the developers are right about this, which they often are, there's still going to be significant disruption (albeit nowhere near the magnitude of having one's house condemned).


Behind all this, and tying the two worlds of city development and software develop together, is culture.  Cities have culture, and so do major software projects.  Each has its own unique culture, but, whether because the same challenges recur over and over again, leading to similar solutions, or because some people are drawn to large communities while others prefer smaller, the cultures of different cities tend to have a fair bit in common, perhaps more in common with each other than with life outside them.  Likewise with major software projects.

Cities require a certain level of infrastructure -- power plants, coordinated traffic lights, parking garages, public transport, etc. -- that smaller communities can mostly do without.  Likewise, a major software project requires some sort of code repository with version control, some form of code review to control what gets into that repository, a bug tracking system and so forth.  This infrastructure comes at a price, but also with significant benefits.  In a large project as in a large city, you don't have to do everything yourself, and at a certain point you can't do everything yourself.  That means people can specialize, and to some extent have to specialize.  This both requires a certain kind of culture and tends to foster that same sort of culture.


It's worth noting that even large software projects are pretty small by the standards of actual cities.  Somewhere around 15,000 people have contributed to the git repository for the Linux kernel.  There appear to be a comparable (but probably smaller) number of Apache committers.  As with anything else, some of these are more active in the community than others.  On the corporate side, large software companies have tens of thousands of engineers, all sharing more or less the same culture.

Nonetheless, major software projects somehow seem to have more of the character of large cities than one might think based on population.  I'm not sure why that might be, or even if it's really true once you start to look more closely, but it's interesting that the question makes sense at all.

Waterfall vs. agile

Near where I work is a construction project for a seven-floor building involving dozens of people on site and suppliers from all over the place, supplying items ranging from local materials to an impressively tall crane from a company on another continent.  There are literally thousands of things to keep track of, from the concrete in the foundation to the location of all the light switches to the weatherproofing for the roof.  The project will take over a year, and there are significant restrictions on what can happen when.  Obviously you can't put windows on before there's a wall in place to put them in, but less obviously there are things you can't do during the several weeks that the structural concrete needs to cure, and so forth.

Even digging the hole for the parking levels took months and not a little planning.  You have to have some place to put all that dirt and the last part takes longer since you no longer have a ramp to drive things in and out with, so whatever you use for that last part has to be small enough you can lift it out.

I generally try to keep in mind that no one else's job is as simple as it looks when you don't have to actually do it, but this is a particularly good example.  Building a building this size, to say nothing of an actual skyscraper, is real engineering.  Add into the mix that lives are literally on the line -- badly designed or built structures do fail and kill people, not to mention the abundance of hazards on a construction site -- and you have a real challenge on your hands.

And yet, the building in question has been proceeding steadily and there's every reason to expect that it will be finished within a few weeks of the scheduled date and at a cost reasonably close to the initial estimate.

We can't do that in my line of work.

Not to say it's never happened, but it's not the norm.  For example, I'm trying to think of a major software provider that still gives dates and feature lists for upcoming releases.  Usually you have some idea of what month the next release might be in, and maybe a general idea of the major features that the marketing is based around, but beyond that, it comes out when it comes out and whatever's in it is in it.  That fancy new feature might be way cooler and better than anyone expected, or it might be a half-baked collection of somewhat-related upgrades that only looks like the marketing if you squint hard enough.

The firmer the date, the vaguer the promised features and vice versa ("schedule, scope, staff: pick two").  This isn't isolated to any one provider (I say "provider" rather than "company" so as to include open source).  Everyone does it in their own way.

In the construction world, this would be like saying "The new building will open on November 1st, but we can't say how many floors it will have or whether there will be knobs on the doors" or "This building will be completely finished somewhere between 12 and 30 months from now."  It's not that construction projects never overrun or go over budget, just that the normal outcomes are in a much tighter range and people's expectations are set accordingly.

[Re-reading this, I realize I didn't mention small consultants doing projects like putting up a website and social media presence for a local store.  I haven't been close to that end of the business for quite a while, but my guess is that delivering essentially on time and within the budget is more common.  However, I'm more interested here in larger projects, like, say, upgrading trade settlement for a major bank.  I don't have a lot of data points for large consultants in such situations, but what I have seen tends to bear out my main points here]

Construction is a classic waterfall process.  In fact, the use of roles like "architect" and "designer" in a waterfall software methodology gives a pretty good hint where the ideas came from.  In construction, you spend a lot of time up front working with an architect and designer to develop plans for the building.  These then get turned into more detailed plans and drawings for the people actually doing the construction.  Once that's done and construction is underway, you pretty much know what you're supposed to be getting.

In between design and construction there's a fair bit of planning that the customer doesn't usually see.  For example, if your building will have steel beams, as many do, someone has to produce the drawing that says exactly what size and grade of beam to use, how long to cut it and (often) exactly where and what size to drill the holes so it can be bolted together with the other steel pieces.  Much of this process is now automated with CAD software, and for that matter more and more of the actual cutting and drilling is automated, but the measurements still have to specified and communicated.

Even if there's a little bit of leeway for changes later in the game -- you don't necessarily have select all the paint colors before they pour concrete for the underground levels -- for the most part you're locked in once the plans are finalized.  You're not going to decide that your seven-level building needs to be a ten-level building while the concrete is curing, or if you do, you'll need to be ready to shell out a lot of money and throw the schedule out the window (if there's one to throw it out of).

Interwoven with all this is a system of zoning, permitting and inspections designed to ensure that your building is safe and usable, and fits in well with the neighborhood and the local infrastructure.  Do you have enough sewer capacity?  Is the building about the same height as the buildings around it (or is the local government on board with a conspicuously tall or short one)?  Will the local electrical grid handle your power demand, and is your wiring sufficient?  This will typically involve multiple checks: The larger-scale questions like how much power you expect to use are addressed during permitting, the plans will be inspected before construction, the actual wiring will be inspected after it's in, and the contractor will need to be able to show that all the electricians working on the job are properly licensed.

This may seem like a lot of hassle, and it is, but most regulations are in place because people learned the hard way.  Wiring from the early 1900s would send most of today's licensed electricians running to the fuse box (if there is one) to shut off the power, or maybe just running out of the immediate area.  There's a reason you Don't Do Things That Way any more: buildings burned down and people got electrocuted.

Putting all this together, large-scale construction uses a waterfall process for two reasons: First, you can't get around it.  It's effectively required by law.  Second, and more interesting here, is that it works.

Having a standard process for designing and constructing a building, standard materials and parts and a standard regime of permits, licenses and inspections gives everyone involved a good idea of what to expect and what to do.  Having the plans finalized allows the builder to order exactly the needed materials (or more realistically, to within a small factor) and precisely track the cost of the project.  Standards and processes allow people to specialize.  A person putting up drywall knows that the studs will be placed with a standard spacing compatible with a standard sheet of drywall without having to know or care exactly how those studs got there.

Sure, there are plenty of cases of construction projects going horribly off the rails, taking several times as long as promised and coming in shockingly over budget, or turning out to be unusable or having major safety issues requiring expensive retrofitting.  It happens, and when it does lots of people tend to hear about it.  But drive into a major city some time.  All around you will be buildings that went up without significant incident, built more or less as I described above.  On your way in will be suburbs full of cookie-cutter houses built the same way on a smaller scale.  The vast majority of them will stand for generations.

Before returning to the field of software, it's worth noting that this isn't the only way to build.  Plenty of houses are built by a small number of people without a lot of formal planning.  Plenty of buildings, particularly houses, have been added onto in increments over time.  People rip out and replace cabinetry or take out walls (ideally non-structural ones) with little more than general knowledge of how houses are put together.  At a larger scale, towns and cities range from carefully planned (Brasilia, Washington D.C) to agglomerations of ancient villages and newer developments with the occasional Grand Plan forced through (London comes to mind).


So why does a process that works fine for projects like buildings, roads and bridges or, with appropriate variations, Big Science projects like CERN, the Square Kilometer Array or the Apollo missions, not seem to carry over to software?  I've been pondering this from time to time for decades now, but I can't say that I've arrived at any definitive answer.  Some possibilities:

• Software is soft.  Software is called "software" because, unlike the hardware, which is wired together and typically shipped off to a customer site, you can change any part of the software whenever you want.  Just restart the server with a new binary, or upgrade the operating system and reboot.  You can even do this with the "firmware" -- code and data that aren't meant to be changed often -- though it will generally require a special procedure.  Buildings and bridges are quintessential hardware.

Yes, but ... in practice you can't change anything you want at any time.  Real software consists of a number of separate components acting together.  When you push a button on a web site, the browser interprets the code for the web page and, after a series of steps, makes a call to the operating system to send a message to the server on the other end.  The server on the other end is typically a "front-end" whose job is to dispatch the message to another server, which may then talk to several others, or to a database (probably running on its own set of servers), or possibly to a server elsewhere on the web or on the internal network, or most likely a combination of some or all of these, in order to do the real work.  The response comes back, the operating system notifies the browser and the browser interprets more of the web page's code in order to update the image on the screen.

This is actually a highly simplified view.  The point here is that all these pieces have to know how to talk to each other and that puts fairly strict limits on what you can change how fast.  Some things are easy.  If I figure out a way to make a component do its current job faster, I can generally just roll that out and the rest of the world is fine, and ideally happier since things that depend on it should get faster for free (otherwise, why make the change?).  If I want to add a new feature, I can generally do that easily too, since no one has to use it until it's ready.

But if I try to change something that lots of people are already depending on, that's going to require some planning.  If it's a small change, I might be able to get by with a "flag" or "mode switch" that says whether to do things the old way or the new way.  I then try to get everyone using the service to adapt to the new way and set the switch to "new".  When everyone's using the "new" mode, I can turn off the "old" mode and brace for an onslaught of "hey, why doesn't this work any more?" from whoever I somehow missed.

Larger changes require much the same thing on a larger scale.  If you hear terms like "backward compatibility" and "lock-in", this is what they're talking about.  There are practices that try to make this easier and even to anticipate future changes ("forward compatibility" or "future-proofing").  Nonetheless, software is not as soft as one might think.

• Software projects are smaller.  Just as it's a lot easier to build at least some kind of house than a seven-level office building, it's easy for someone to download a batch of open source tools and put together an app or an open source tool or any of a number of other things (my post on Paul Downey's hacking on a CSV of government data shows how far you can get with not-even-big-enough-to-call-a-project).  There are projects just like this all over GitHub.

Yes, but ... there are lots of small projects around, some of which even see a large audience, but if this theory were true you'd expect to see a more rigid process as projects get larger, as you do in moving from small DIY projects to major construction. That's not necessarily the case.  Linux grew from Linus's two processes printing "A" and "B" on the screen to millions of lines of kernel code and millions more of tools and applications.  The development process may have gradually become more structured over time, but it's not anything like a classic waterfall.  The same could be said of Apache and any number of similar efforts.  Projects do tend to add some amount of process as they go ("So-and-so will now be in charge of the Frobulator component and will review all future changes"), but not nearly to the point of a full-fledged waterfall.

For that matter, it's not clear that Linux or Apache should be considered single projects.  They're more like a collection of dozens or hundreds of projects, each with its own specific standards and practices, but nonetheless they fit together into a more or less coherent whole.  The point being, it can be hard to say how big a particular project is or isn't.

I think this is more or less by design.  Software engineering has a strong drive to "decouple" so that different parts can be developed largely independently.  This generally requires being pretty strict about the boundaries and interfaces between the various components, but that's a consequence of the desire to decouple, not a driving principle in and of itself.  To the extent that decoupling is successful, it allows multiple efforts to go on in parallel without a strictly-defined architecture or overall plan.  The architecture, such as it is, is more an emergent property of the smaller-scale decisions about what the various components do and how they interact.

The analogy here is more with city planning than building architecture.  While it's generally good to have someone taking the long view in order to help keep things working smoothly overall, this doesn't mean planning out every piece in advance, or even having a master plan.  You can get surprisingly well with the occasional "Wait, how is this going to work with that" or "There are already two groups working on this problem -- maybe you should talk to them before starting a third one".

Rather than a single construction project, a project like Linux or Apache is much like a city growing in stages over time.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like that analogy.  I'd like to develop it further.

I had wanted to add a few more bullet points, particularly "Software is innovative" -- claiming that people generally write software in order to do something new, while a new skyscraper, however innovative the design, is still a skyscraper (and more innovative buildings tend to cost more, take longer and have a higher risk of going over budget) -- but I think I'll leave that for now.  This post is already on the longish side and developing the city analogy seems more interesting at the moment.

Economics of anonymity -- but whose economics?

Re-reading the posts I've tagged with the anonymity label, I think I finally put my finger on something that had been bothering me pretty much from the beginning.  I'd argued (here, for example) that economic considerations should make it hard to successfully run an anonymizer -- a service that allows you to connect with sites on the internet without giving away who or where you are.  And yet they exist.

The argument was that the whole point of an anonymizer is that whoever's connecting to a given site could be anyone using the anonymizer, that is, if you're using the anonymizer, you could be associated with anything that anyone on the anonymizer was doing.  Since some things that people want to do anonymously are risky, an anonymizer is, in some sense, distributing risk.  People doing risky things should be happy to participate, but people doing less risky things may not be so willing.  As a result, there may not be enough people participating to provide adequate cover.

However, this assumes that anyone can be (mis)taken for anyone else.  At the technical level of IP addresses, this is true, but at the level of who's actually doing what, which is what really matters if The Man comes knocking, it's less applicable.

There are lots of reasons to want anonymity -- the principle of the thing, the ability to do stuff you're not supposed to be able to do at work, wanting to hide embarrassing activity from the people around you, wanting to blow the whistle on an organization, communicating to the outside world from a repressive regime, dealing in illicit trade, planning acts of violence and many others.  The fact of using an anonymizer says little about why you might be doing it.

If I'm anonymously connecting to FaceSpace at work, there's little chance that the authorities in whatever repressive regime will come after me for plotting to blow up their government buildings, and vice versa (mutatis mutandis et cetera.).  In other words, there's probably not much added risk for people doing relatively innocuous things in places where using an anonymizer is not itself illegal.

On the other hand, this is little comfort to someone trying to, say, send information out of a place where use of the internet, and probably anonymizers in particular, is restricted.  The local authorities will probably know exactly which hosts are connecting with the anonymizer's servers and make it their business to find out who's associated with those hosts -- a much smaller task than tracking down all users of the anonymizer.

This is much the same situation as, say, spies in WWII trying to send radio messages out before the local authorities can triangulate their position.   Many of the same techniques should apply -- never setting up in the same place twice, limiting the number of people you communicate with and how much you know about them, limiting the amount of information you know, and so forth.

So I suppose I'll be filing this under not-so-disruptive technology as well as anonymity.

Agile vs. waterfall

Another comment reply that outgrew the comment box.  Earl comments

This speaks to my prejudice in favor of technique over technology. And the concept of agility seems to be just the attitude of any good designer that your best weapon is your critical sense, and your compulsion to discard anything that isn't going to work.

To which I would reply:

Sort of ... "agile" is a term of art that refers to a collection of practices aimed at reducing the lag between finding out people want something and giving it to them.  Arguably the core of it is "launch and iterate", meaning "put your best guess out there, find out what it still needs, fix the most important stuff and try again".

This is more process than design, but there are definitely some design rules that tend to go with agile development, particularly "YAGNI", short for "You ain't gonna need it", which discourages trying to anticipate a need you don't yet know that you have.  In more technical terms, this means not trying to build a general framework for every possible use case, but being prepared to "refactor" later on if you find out that you need to do more than you thought you did.  Or, better, designing in such a way that later functionality can be added with minimum disruption to what's already there, often by having less to disrupt to begin with, because ... YAGNI.

Downey refers to "agile" both generally and in the more specific context of "agile vs. waterfall".  The "waterfall" design process called for exhaustively gathering all requirements up front, then producing a design to meet those requirements, then implementing the design, then independently testing the implementation against the requirements, fixing any bugs, retesting and eventually delivering a product to the customer.  Each step of the process flows into the next, and you only go forward, much like water flowing over a series of cascades.  Only the test/fix/retest/... cycle was meant to be iterative, and ideally with as few iterations as possible.  Waterfall projects can take months at the least and more typically years to get through all the steps, at which point there's a significant chance that the customer's understanding of what they want has evolved -- but don't worry, we can always gather more requirements, produce an improved design ...

(As an aside, Downey alludes to discussion over whether "customer" is an appropriate term for someone, say, accessing a public data website.  A fair point.  I'm using "customer" here because in this case this is someone paying money for a the service of producing software.   The concept of open source cuts against this, but that's a whole other discussion.)

The waterfall approach can be useful in situations like space missions and avionics.  In the first case, when you launch, you're literally launched and there is no "iterate".  In the second, the cost of an incomplete or not-fully-vetted implementation is too high to risk.  However, there's a strong argument to be made that "launch and iterate" works in more cases than one might think.

In contrast to waterfall approaches, agile methodologies think more in terms of weeks.  A series of two-week "sprints", each producing some number of improvements from a list, is a fairly common approach. Some web services go further and use a "push on green" process where anything that passes the tests (generally indicated by a green bar on a test console) goes live immediately.  Naturally, part of adding a new feature is adding tests that it has to pass, but that should generally be the case anyway.

Superficially, a series of two-week sprints may seem like a waterfall process on a shorter time scale, but I don't think that's a useful comparison.  In a classic waterfall, you talk to your customer up front and then go dark for months, or even a year or more while the magic happens, though the development managers may produce a series of progress reports with an aggregate number of requirements implemented or such.  Part of the idea or short sprints, on the other hand, is to stay in contact with your customer in order to get frequent feedback on whether you're doing the right thing.   Continuous feedback is one of the hallmarks of a robust control system, whether in software or steam engines.

There are also significant differences in the details of the processes.  In an agile process, the list of things to do (often organized by "stories") can and does get updated at any time.  The team will generally pick a set of things to implement at the the beginning of a sprint in order to coordinate their efforts, but this is more a tactical decision, and "requirements gathering" is not blocked while the developers are implementing.

Work in agile shops tends to be estimated in relative terms like "small", "medium" or "large", since people are much better at estimating relative sizes, and there's generally an effort to break "large" items into smaller pieces since people are better at estimating them.  Since this is done frequently, everyone ends up doing a bunch of fairly small-scale estimates on a regular basis, and hopefully skills improve.

Waterfall estimates are generally done up front by specialists.  By the end of the design phase, you should have a firm estimate of how long the rest will take (and, a cynic might add, a firm expectation of putting in serious overtime as the schedule begins to slip).

It's not clear how common a true waterfall process is in practice.  I've personally only seen it once up close, and the result was a slow-motion trainwreck the likes of which I hope never to see again.  Among other things, the process called for designers to reduce their designs to "pseudocode", which is basically a detailed description of an algorithm using words instead of a formal computer language.

This was to be done in such detail that the actual coder hired to produce the code would not have to make any decisions in translating the pseudocode to actual code.  This was explicitly stated in the (extensive) process documentation.  But if you can explain something in that much detail, you've essentially coded it and you're just using the coder as an expensive human typewriter, not a good proposition for anyone involved.  You've also put a layer of scheduling and paperwork between designing an algorithm and finding out whether it works.

We did, however, produce an impressive volume of paper binders full of documentation.  I may still have a couple somewhere.  I'm not sure I or anyone else has ever needed to read them.

This is an extreme case, but the mindset behind it is pervasive enough to make "agile vs. waterfall" a real controversy.  As with all such controversy at least some of the waterfallish practices actually out there have more merit than the extreme case.  The extreme case, even though it does exist in places, functions more as a strawman.  Nonetheless, I tend to favor the sort of "admirable impatience" that Downey exemplifies.  Like anything else it can be taken too far, but not in the case at hand.

One CSV, 30 stories (for small values of 30)

While re-reading some older posts on anonymity (of which more later, probably), and updating the occasional broken link, I happened to click through on the credit link on my profile picture.  Said link is still in fine fettle and, while it hasn't been updated in a while, and one of the more recent posts is Paul Downey chastising himself for just that, there's still plenty of interesting material there, including the (current) last post, now nearly three years old, with a brilliant observation on "scope creep".

What caught my attention in particular was the series One CSV, thirty stories, which took on the "do 30 Xs in 30 days" kind of challenge in an effort to kickstart the blog.  Taken literally, it wasn't a great success -- there only ended up being 21 stories, and there hasn't been much on the blog since -- but purely from a blogging point of view I'd say the experiment was indeed a success.

Downey takes a single, fairly large, CSV file containing records of land sales transactions from the UK and proceeds to turn this raw data into useful and interesting information.  The analysis starts with basic statistics such as how many transactions there are (about 19 million), how many years they cover (20) and how much money changed hands (about £3 trillion) and ends up with some nifty visualizations showing changes in activity from day to day within the week, over the course of the year and over decades.

This is all done with off-the-shelf tools, starting with old-school Unix commands that date back to the 70s and then pulling together various free-source from off the web.  Two of Downey's recurring themes, which were very much evident to me when we worked together on standards committees, um, a few years ago, are also very much in evidence here: A deep commitment to open data and software, and an equally strong conviction that one can and should be able to do significant things with data using basic and widely available tools.

A slogan that pops up a couple of times in the stories is "Making things open makes them better".  In this spirit, all the code and data used is publicly available.  Even better, though, the last story, Mistakes were made, catches the system in the act of improving itself due to its openness.  On a smaller scale, reader suggestions are incorporated in real time and several visualizations benefit from collaboration with colleagues.

There's even a "hack day" in the middle.  If anything sums up Downey's ideal of how technical collaboration should work, it's this: "My two favourite hacks had multidisciplinary teams build something, try it with users, realise it was the wrong thing, so built something better as a result. All in a single day!"  It's one thing to believe in open source, agile development and teamwork in the abstract.  The stories show them in action.

As to the second theme, the whole series, from the frenetic "30 things in 30 days" pace through to the actual results, shows an admirable sort of impatience:  Let's not spend a lot of time spinning up the shiniest tools on a Big Data server farm.  I've got a laptop.  It's got some built-in commands.  I've got some data.  Let's see what we can find out.

Probably my favorite example is the use of geolocation in Postcodes.  It would be nice to see sales transactions plotted on a map of the UK.  Unfortunately, we don't have one of those handy, and they're surprisingly hard to come by and integrate with, but never mind.  Every transaction is tagged with a "northing" and "easting", basically latitude and longitude, and there are millions of them.  Just plot them spatially and, voila, a map of England and Wales, incidentally showing clearly that the data set doesn't cover Scotland or Northern Ireland.

I wouldn't say that just anyone could do the same analyses in 30 days, but neither is there any deep wizardry going on.  If you've taken a couple of courses in computing, or done a moderate amount of self-study, you could almost certainly figure out how the code in the stories works and do some hacking on it yourself (in which case, please contribute anything interesting back to the repository).  And then go forth and hack on other interesting public data sets, or, if you're in a position to do so, make some interesting data public yourself (but please consult with your local privacy expert first).

In short, these stories are an excellent model of what the web was meant to be: open, collaborative, lightweight and fast.

Technical content aside, there are also several small treasures in the prose, from Wikipedia links on a variety of subjects to a bit on the connection between the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and the discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell et. al..

Finally, one of the pleasures of reading the stories was their sheer Englishness (and, if I understand correctly, their Northeast Englishness in particular).   The name of the blog is whatfettle.  I've already mentioned postcodes, eastings and northings, but the whole series is full of Anglicisms -- whilst, a spot of breakfast, cock-a-hoop, if you are minded, splodgy ... Not all of these may be unique to the British Isles, but the aggregate effect is unmistakeable.

I hesitate to even mention this for fear of seeming to make fun of someone else's way of speaking, but that's not what I'm after at all.   This isn't cute or quaint, it's just someone speaking in their natural manner.  The result is located or even embodied.  On the internet, anyone could be anywhere, and we all tend to pick up each other's mannerisms.  But one fundamental aspect of the web is bringing people together from all sorts of different backgrounds.  If you buy that, then what's the point if no one's background shows through?

Cookies, https and OpenId

I finally got around to looking at the various notices that have accumulated on the admin pages for this blog.  As a result:

• This blog is supposed to display a notice regarding cookies if you access it from the EU.  I'm not sure that this notice is actually appearing when it should (I've sent feedback to try to clarify), but as far as I can tell blogspot is handling cookies for this blog just like any other.  I have not tried to explicitly change that behavior.
• This blog has for some time used "redirect to https".  This means that if you try to access this blog via http://, it will be automatically changed to https://.  This shouldn't make any difference.  On the one hand, https has been around for many years, all browsers I know of handle it just fine and in any case this blog has been redirecting to https for a long time without incident.  On the other hand, this is a public blog, so there's no sensitive private information here.  It might maybe make a difference if you have to do some sort of login to leave comments, but I doubt it.
• Blogger no longer supports OpenID.  I think this would only matter if I'd set up "trust these web sites" under the OpenId settings, but I didn't.

In other words, this should all be a whole lot of nothing, but I thought I'd let people know.

Bombshell revelations about Hedy Lamarr (sorry, couldn't resist)

A while ago I posted about the role of actor/inventor Hedy Lamarr in the development of the "frequency hopping" communication technology now used in cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth and various military applications, among others.  Now (well, since last year) there's a whole movie about it: Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.  In fact, there's actually something of a cottage industry in Lamarr-related productions, including books, plays, magazine articles and not a few blog posts.

The movie goes into detail on Lamarr's life, from her childhood in Vienna to her Hollywood career, her relationship with aviation magnate Howard Hughes (who provided access to his company's chemists and engineers for her personal projects), her now-famous patent with George Antheil, her reclusive later days and her eventual recognition for her technical contributions.  There are fresh interviews with friends, admirers, children and grandchildren along with archival interviews of Lamarr herself, altogether providing a well-rounded view of a lively mind.

Bombshell and the Hedy Lamarr revival in general have given long-overdue appreciation to someone who until recently was most recognized for her work in an industry concerned nearly exclusively with her looks, despite her efforts to find more challenging roles and her ultimately unsuccessful attempts to break into producing.  My one quibble with the film concerns the impact of her patent.  Because geek.

It is clear that US Navy contractors used the patent directly in the development of a communication system among ships, planes and sonobuoys and that a related system was used during the naval blockade in the Cuban missile crisis.  At least some of that work was done before the patent expired, lending support to Lamarr's claim that she was due the customary payment for the use of her and Antheil's invention.

It's also clear that Antheil contributed significantly to the patent, particularly because he had experience in synchronizing player pianos.  The scheme used 88 frequencies, one for each key on a piano, and needed the ship's radio and the torpedo's to stay in sync.  Three guesses how this was accomplished.  Nonetheless, the initial idea of frequency hopping was Lamarr's and it was she who actively recruited Antheil for assistance with the practical design.

This was a real, significant contribution to communications, and one that was put to practical use, albeit not as originally designed, including in one of the most critical moments of the 20th century.  Neither was it a fluke.  Lamarr had a lifelong interest in what we now call STEM and this was not her only invention, just the most successful.  From what I've seen I have no doubt at all of her geek cred.

However, we should be careful not to go too far, as least not without providing a bit of perspective.  The film itself doesn't go so far as to say Lamarr invented WiFi.  That would simply not be accurate, though that hasn't stopped the occasional web site from making just that claim.  However, it does heavily imply that frequency hopping plays a major role in, for example, the security of military satellites, and it explicitly calls out WiFi, bluetooth and cell phones to claim that Lamarr's invention touches a huge swath of modern-day humanity.

Yes, but ... No one person invented WiFi, which includes everything from the use of the frequency spectrum to the handshaking and security protocols, an implementation of IP (internet protocol) and the specification of metadata such as the SSID.  Likewise, Lamarr's is not the only patent or invention concerning frequency hopping.  None other than Nikola Tesla filed an early patent describing it.  Wikipedia has a summary of other developments of the concept, including use by the German military in  World War I, well before Lamarr and Antheil's patent.

WiFi certainly doesn't use piano rolls to select frequencies.  Technology has marched on in the decades since then.  If we're going to credit the general concept of frequency hopping, we should recognize its full history, not just Lamarr's contribution.  Likewise for frequency hopping in the context of Bluetooth and CDMA in cell phones.

As to security, while the patent was originally filed for a "secret communication system", frequency hopping doesn't provide meaningful security against modern attackers.  Any real security is provided by encryption systems built on usual suspects like DES and RSA, which operate on completely different principles and were of course developed completely separately.  To see this, look no further than WiFi, whose original security was notoriously weak, even though it included both frequency hopping and an encryption layer on top of that.  Neither that layer nor the later improvements have anything to do with frequency hopping.

On the other hand, another of Lamarr's original motivations was to circumvent jamming -- flooding a frequency with enough noise to drown out any real communication.  Frequency hopping with a shared key -- the gist of the patent -- is still effective for that.  If you don't know which of several dozen frequencies the actual signal is on, you have jam all of them, which requires proportionately more power and might not even be practical in some situations.  That's very much alive, and important in military applications, but it's not a form of secrecy and it has little to do with WiFi or bluetooth, except that switching WiFi or Bluetooth frequencies can avoid accidental interference from other devices.


By all accounts Hedy Lamarr was an impressive person: talented, highly intelligent, diligent, creative and in many respects ahead of her times.  Bombshell does a fine job conveying this, and, probably more importantly, the often tragic tension between who she was and who most of the world wanted her to be.  It is also forthright about her flaws and failings and it even does a decent job with the technical details, even considering the critiques above.  All this is well worth recognizing and celebrating.  Putting Lamarr and Antheil's patent in proper perspective does nothing to diminish this, even if it takes away the easy narrative of Lamarr the unsung hero of the mobile revolution.

Bitcoin and the B-word

It's not hard these days to find a chart comparing the price of Bitcoin to the NASDAQ from the dotcom bubble.  They line up pretty well, provided you stretch the time scale of Bitcoin out considerably on the way up and somewhat less considerably on the way down.  Whether this means Bitcoin is actually in a bubble is something we don't know just yet.  Bubbles are only referred to with certainty in past tense: "That was a bubble".

There are arguments on either side.  One that I don't buy is "The last time Bitcoin fell by X amount, it later rose by way-more-than-X amount."  That's nice, but I'd kinda like to see a mechanism, not just numbers.  There aren't that many 10X jumps left before Bitcoin is literally all the money in the world (I do realize that that's the endgame if you're a hardcore cryptocurrency advocate).  There are interesting questions about just exactly how that would happen, but what happens after that?  What does it mean for Bitcoin to appreciate another 10X over the dollar if there are no more dollars?

Presumably at some point BTC rising against the dollar no longer means that Bitcoin is becoming more valuable in terms of the goods and services a Bitcoin can purchase, but that the dollar is becoming less valuable in real terms until it finally goes away.  How we get hyperinflation in a currency whose supply is going to zero is an interesting question.  I'm not sure there are any historical precedents here.  When the major currencies went off the gold standard in the 20th century, gold was still there and still had value.  If dollars go away entirely then at some point we're dividing zero by zero, which can come out to any number you like.

But, for the Nth time in drafting this post, I digress down a rabbit hole of speculation over Just What Does It All Mean.  The question I wanted to address here is, "Is Bitcoin in a bubble?"

But I already answered that.  One of the defining properties of a bubble is you don't know for sure if you're in it.  It's possible, at least in principle, that the price of Bitcoin could stabilize in some fairly tight range, and if that range isn't too far off the top (somewhere north of $19K) then we had some wild fluctuations, but not a bubble.  If it keeps falling toward zero, even if it eventually stabilizes around $1000, or $100, or $10 or whatever, then I think you'll have to say we had a bubble.

Does it matter?

I'd say not really.  If you're trading BTC, the important part is how you came out.  You might have made a lot of money, or lost it, or even both, but you can do that trading blue chips on the NYSE (How do you make a small fortune on Wall Street?  Start with a large one.)  If you're interested in Bitcoin as a store of value or a payment system or whatever, then what matters is whether that comes to pass, not the exact price of BTC when that may happen.

People throw around terms like "correction", "crash" or "bubble collapse" mainly, I think, to express an opinion about what's going to happen, not what has.  A correction implies that things got a bit out of hand but everything will be fine in the long run.  A crash means prices fell far and fast, but doesn't really say anything about the future.  A bubble collapse says that not only did prices fall, but there was much less ever there than people thought at the time.  If prices ever do recover, it won't be for a good long time, and for much different reasons than drove the runup to the bubble bursting.  Which of those is happening now depends on who you ask (though it's hard to call a 60%+ drop off the top a correction with a straight face).

I think that, along with the previous post, is about all I want to say about Bitcoin for a while.  I note that it's been a prevalent topic here for a while -- not that I've been posting that much on anything here -- and there's got to be other web.stuff to talk about.

Crypto assets

A large portion of what one might read about Bitcoin and company online falls into a few broad classes:

• Bitcoin is totally a bubble!
• It's unfolding just like the dotcom bubble around the turn of the century, but a lot faster
• Bitcoin isn't actually worth anything
• Bitcoin is totally not a bubble!
• The last time it crashed it was way, way up a year later.  Do you really want to miss out?
• Cryptocurrencies will take over the world.  The world's money supply is worth tens of trillions of dollars, so BTC is conservatively worth at least $1 million (or something along those lines).
• You're all missing the point.  It's not Bitcoin, it's the blockchain.
• Blockchains are useful because they provide a secure, shared, decentralized ledger
• Even if a particular currency fizzles out, there's still value in the technology

While researching a separate post, which I may or may not end up actually posting [I did, more or less -- see next post], I ran across this much more nuanced take by Adam Ludwin on the blog for chain.com.  If nothing else, I love the disclaimers at the top, a bullet list ending with several "Very few people <in some group> understand what's going on" and finally "It’s very possible I don’t understand what’s going on".

In that spirit, a disclaimer or two of my own: I'd never heard of Chain or Adam Ludwin before this and I have no financial interest in it or in any crypto currency.  I do note that Chain's tagline is "We build cryptographic ledgers that underpin breakthrough financial products," so it's pretty clear what Ludwin/Chain's basic stance is (and, of course, that's a good thing).

The piece itself is to some extent in the third bucket above, except with a lot more thought and detail and without the usual air of certainty.  The thesis, as I understand it, is that Bitcoin and things like it are properly assets, not currency, and their value lies in supporting a certain class of distributed application where various people contribute resources to the application as a whole, and/or consume such resources.

To make this work there has to be some sort of ledger that everyone trusts.  One way to do that is to put someone -- say, a bank -- in charge of the ledger.  Crypto assets provide an alternative, namely a secure ledger with no single, centralized authority, which can be trusted without having to trust all the other participants, or even any particular participant.

Ludwin is careful to point out that this is not always, or even often, worth the trouble.  A decentralized, secure ledger incurs significant overhead, since one way or another you have to be sure that the various parties can agree on what's in the ledger.  More importantly, at least in my view, a decentralized system is by definition not governed by any single authority, meaning governance has to be provided directly by the participants.  There should be cases where this is worth the trouble, but it's not a given.

Bitcoin itself is probably not the best example of what Ludwin is driving at.  Better examples (which Ludwin cites) would be Filecoin (a token for tracking who is providing and using storage in a decentralized cloud) and Ethereum (a generalized platform for crypto assets).  Ludwin attributes special significance to Bitcoin anyway on the basis that it currently represents the biggest chunk of actual money associated with crypto assets.  I'm personally skeptical of this argument, and "first mover advantage" arguments in general, but it's not totally unreasonable.

What follows are my own thoughts, which should all start with "It’s very possible I don’t understand what’s going on", but in bigger, bolder letters.

One of my fundamental concerns with "cryptocurrencies" in general and Bitcoin in particular is that it seems hard to draw a direct line from the value of secure, decentralized ledgers as a service to the value of the associated asset.  The ledger technology may be valuable in general, but that doesn't mean that any particular crypto asset is valuable.  Which tokens you're using is essentially a matter of what ledger you're writing things on, but what makes a ledger valuable?

Before computers, actual paper ledgers carried records of billions of dollars in assets, but the price of paper didn't rise as a result.  It came down over time as paper-making and printing became more efficient.  Very few people cared who printed the ledger, so long as the layout was usable.

One of the key ideas behind Bitcoin and some but not all other tokens is that they will become more valuable over time because there is a strictly limited supply.  But if the price of BTC in dollars keeps going up because everyone is hodling on to them, why use it?  Why not use something else, or spin up your own tokens on Ethereum?

At the end of the day people hosting the ledger will need to be paid for the computing resources they provide, but this should be a modest cost relative to the amounts recorded on the ledger.  One way or another there will be a flow of money from users of the ledger to providers of the service.  In some cases these will be the same people.  If I buy some capacity from a cloud provider and use it to participate in a ledger that I also use to record transactions of whatever nature, then I'm paying the cost of the computing resources to the cloud provider, and that may be about it.

This is assuming that participating in a ledger is relatively cheap.  This is decidedly not the case for proof-of-work based systems like Bitcoin.  Adding a new block to the Bitcoin blockchain currently gets a reward of 12.5 BTC plus whatever transaction fees are included (currently nominal).  At current prices that's somewhere around $80K per block, or around $60 per transaction.  This reward is effectively covered by inflating BTC rather than by direct payment, but miners are most certainly getting paid and are most certainly spending reserve currency on equipment and electricity.

However, I see no structural reason for a ledger to be expensive, unless proof-of-work really is the only way to solve the double spending problem. Without proof-of-work you're computing cryptographic signatures and copying bytes over a network.  This isn't free, but it's not that expensive either.

Which leaves us with this.  If secure, distributed ledgers are expensive, that's one more reason not to use them.  If they're cheap, then it's hard to see how people will make huge piles of money off them.  The optimum is probably in the middle somewhere, with people making modest amounts of money for providing a useful but fairly mundane service.  It's still possible for individuals to make serious money in such an environment, but more in "old-fashioned" ways such as providing better service or a marginally lower price to a lot of customers.

Another beautiful web.toy

Following a link from Wikipedia, I landed at earth.nullschool.net, which shows a gorgeous visualization of the current wind patterns on earth, at your choice of altitudes and with several possible color overlays, including temperature, humidity and "misery index".  You can, of course, zoom and pan where you like and, for bonus style points, the pan feature redraws the map projection in real time, giving the impression that you're warping the fabric of space itself.

I'm pretty sure I've seen visualizations like this before, and even mentioned one or two here, but I'm pretty sure I haven't run across/linked to this particular one before.  A quick search suggests I haven't.  In any case, enjoy!