accept security warnings

The company that I work for is stupid.

I make no secret that I work for a network security company. I won't state the name of the company, because if I do, then I'm required to follow the company's 'blogging policy' or I could be terminated. Normally, the process leading up to termination would involve a nice beefy severance package, which I'd happily take at this moment, but if I violate this particular edict, I can be terminated without any such package offer, which would.. well.. suck.

Anyway, I digress.

This is a NETWORK SECURITY company. We ought to, oh.. I don't know.. give a rat's ass about security? But no.. Today I get in the mail a nifty little card that provides instructions and reminders for how to the use meeting tools that I've been using for about a year now. Handy little card.. it has a number of steps on how to set-up/join a conference online.

Step number 4: 'Accept Security Warnings'

Not.. 'you will see this certificate displayed', or 'you will see X signed ActiveX control ask for permission to do Y', or even 'a security popup may appear with X text, please accept to continue'. No.. just a blanket 'Accept Security Warnings'.

Now, if I was a more devious bastard than I am, I might use this information, along with the links provided and some clever scripting, to harvest authentication tokens of people in my company. Generally the folks that would be setting up online meetings are interesting people to get passwords from. Usually these would be either mid-level managers or assistants to execs.. What could I do with these tokens?

Well.. I could fire people, give myself a bonus, if not a raise... Yes, there is a required approval chain for these things to happen, but if I got auth tokens from everyone who sets up a meeting, how long do you think it would take me to get the tokens for everyone in the auth chain? The system would then automagically do its dirty work and remove my rivals as well as make me rich.

I SO should have been a criminal rather than an engineer.

free money!

One of the perks of my new position is the ability to originate bonuses for people, even people that don't work directly for me.

So, I did. I just flooded (well, tinkled in) the wallets of a bunch of deserving people, about half of whom don't work for me.

Yay! Free money!

Too bad I can't give myself a bonus..

inertia

Physics gives us the concept of inertia, and in physics, inertia is a powerful thing, but I think that as a metaphor, inertia might be the most powerful force in the universe.

I'm fighting against more than 30 years of inertia every day now. Well, not every day... some days it's just too hard, but I really am trying.

Part of that inertia is a tendency to 'let myself off the hook.' This sounds pretty terrible, and it is. It's oddly something that I STRONGLY do not identify with my own self-image, but it's something I do fairly frequently, it would seem.

--late edit
This is an interesting post.. I started this almost six months ago. And I didn't publish it.. Thus, perpetuating the problem I was identifying. Man.. I have some serious damage control to do.

the fifth Cylon

It's got to be Ellen Tigh - Saul's (the XO of Gallactica) wife.

In the first season, she was mysteriously 'discovered' alive on a ship in the colonial fleet as a 'Jane Doe' and then brought aboard Gallactica and reunited with Saul. Everyone thought she was a Cylon then.. of course, her being dead again makes it difficult. We've never seen any clones of the the 4 new Cylons that we know of, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.

It does seem like she's been dead for a long time to be just now showing up, but there definitely WAS a Resurrection Ship in range when Saul killed her for being a Cylon double-agent, even if she was doing it to protect Saul at the expense of the Revolution on New Caprica.

A good case can also be (and has often been) made for Kara Thrace, what with her disappearing for months and not remembering any of it, but since the non-lobotomized Raiders seem to be able to recognize at least Anders and probably the other 5, and they don't seem to be too squeamish about trying to kill Kara, I think that's probably unlikely.

My money is on Ellen. Literally.

hubris

Lords of Kobol, save me!

Yesterday, I was King of the Cube: unstoppable, unbeatable, a veritable god amongst men.

Today... the open-mouthed-eater is back from his customer visit and I am once again going batcrap nutzo.

Oh well, at least I have Thriller to keep me distracted.

Yes, I like some old-school Michael Jackson.

I am all powerful

Not since the days of early Ultima Online, when I was known as The Dread Lord Baal or The Great Lord Tevyar (depending on my personality for that day) have I had so much power.

And no, before you begin to think so, this is not another post about EVE Online.

I work for a network security company. I'm an engineering manager. I've been 'acting' as a manager for quite a long time now, but didn't hold the title, which means that there was always a way to end-run around any of my proclamations.

Well, NO MORE!

For better or for worse, the buck stops with me now, and if I'm not happy, you're not getting your way.

Fuck 'em. Let them throw me out if they don't like it.

Adam Kadmon and orchestrated objective reduction

I'm not really sure why, but something has been troubling me quite a bit lately.

I was raised to be a good Catholic, so I have this huge store of meaningless mythology at the back of my head. The Catholics, stolen from the Jews, have a concept of the Guf - the Well of Souls from which all human souls are drawn. Certain septs of Kabbalah extend this in such a way that the Guf is not an actual place in this world or any other, but instead represents the original man before original sin - Adam Kadmon. Each of us, since the breaking of Eden, are but a shard of that soul.

Now, this is really uninteresting by itself, but it's been intersecting in my head a lot with another concept that's been bothering me - Orch OR.

Orch OR - or Orchestrated Objective Reduction - is a concept from quantum mechanics and to a slightly lesser extent, psychology. It's an attempt to explain why the human brain, arguably nothing more complex than an organic chemical pile of goo, is capable of instantly computing things that mathematics shows to be intractable and modern computing requires hours and hours of computer time to solve. See - the only way that physicists can figure out how to instantly come up with the solution to a search space problem like - is that a boy or a girl? - with all of the myriad of permutations that might come out of this, is to use a quantum computer. If the computer can simultaneously process every possible path and then through a process of Objective Reduction instantly _find_ an answer, then it will have achieved what we've all been capable of since the time we knew that there was difference between boys and girls. Now - we don't always get it right, but then, neither would a quantum computer, and our own brains are a bit fuzzy. Ever have too much wine?

How do these relate?

Well - suppose that Orch OR is correct. The human brain is an organic quantum computer that is capable of orchestrating objective reductions of a quantum matrix to align to some kind of goal. Consciousness becomes possible because there is a finite set of computations being performed within the matrix of the brain - some of these are pure computations, some of these are orchestrating actions, and some of these are short term storage loops. Memory is a whole different ball of wax.. maybe literally..

This means that it's possible, and perhaps necessary, to create consciousness in any system capable of orchestrating quantum objective reductions.

Scientists are getting closer and closer to solving the decoherence problem and creating a working quantum computer. At first, the orchestration for this will be human action, but in short order, we'll start programming the computers to program themselves, probably through a series of finite state automata. Once we do this, we will have created, at least in a rudimentary sense, consciousness. It's possible that it might not be very rudimentary at all.

So - the former Catholic/Gnostic/mystic in me asks - does the consciousness for this get imbued with the will of Adam?

I don't really believe that way anymore, but it troubles me that I thought of it at all.

you are rubber and I am glue

Weird things in my stream of thought today.

I recall reading about quantum superposition theory once upon a time and thinking to myself - "That means that this is _my_ universe."

It's not an obvious logical progression to get here from there, so let me explain a little...

If this theory is correct (discounting quantum decoherence theory), there has to be one single thread that is holding _this_ universe together. Now, the exactness of _this_ is debatable, but so is the exactness of _me_ in this context.

The gist is this. Every quantum state that is possible is. Because I experience a continuous thread of existence - and the only one that I am capable of verifying - I am the glue that holds my universe together. An infinity of other universes exist that correspond to every other possible state, and you are all transient occupants of my universe, then instantly evaporate into another of these as soon as a new quantum wave function collapses.

So - you're rubber, and I'm glue.

Don't piss me off, or I'll stop thinking about you.

flight of the conchords

I love Flight of the Conchords. These guys are awesome. They just recently announced a second show in San Francisco after the first one sold out.

It goes on sale tomorrow at ticketbastard, but there IS a pre-sale that started yesterday.

Apparently it was only supposed to be for fan club members, but I'm not a fan club member, and I can't even find any information on how to join their fan club, which I totally would have done to get the pre-sale password.

I did, however, find the password. If you want tickets and you haven't found it yet yourself, and there are any pre-sale tickets available (I doubt it, but who knows) the password is "fouxdufafa" (sans the quotes, of course.) This seems obvious, once you see it, but of course hindsight is much more clear than foresight.

I won't tell you how I found it, but suffice it to say, the internets is a powerful thing. If you've attended a lecture by the great Johnny Long, you can probably find just about any piece of information that exists.. somewhere.. on the internets.

If you're stumbling upon this and it's not yet on general sale, give it a shot, you never know..

That being said... I got my tickets yesterday, bitches.