Perilocity

Bananas and Apples: Another Monoculture

Yes, we will have no bananas, again:

Most commercial growing facilities handle just a single banana type — the one we Americans slice into our morning cereal.

...

How much time is left for the Cavendish? Some scientists say five years; some say 10. Others hold out hope that it will be much longer. Aguilar has his own particular worst-case scenario, his own nightmare. "What happens," he says, with a very intent look, "is that Panama disease comes before we have a good replacement. What happens then," he says, nearly shuddering in the shade of a towering banana plant, "is that people change. To apples."

—Can This Fruit Be Saved? By Dan Koeppel, popsci.com, June 2005

Cavendish is the variety of banana eaten the world around. "Quite possibly the world's perfect food," says Chiquita. But perfection comes with a price if it leads to monoculture. And that's what we've got with bananas: every commercial Cavendish banana tree is grown from cuttings of the original tree, and so is genetically identical. Banana monoculture has borne the fruit of disaster before.

Growers adopted a frenzied strategy of shifting crops to unused land, maintaining the supply of bananas to the public but at great financial and environmental expense — the tactic destroyed millions of acres of rainforest. By 1960, the major importers were nearly bankrupt, and the future of the fruit was in jeopardy. (Some of the shortages during that time entered the fabric of popular culture; the 1923 musical hit "Yes! We Have No Bananas" is said to have been written after songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn were denied in an attempt to purchase their favorite fruit by a syntactically colorful, out-of-stock neighborhood grocer.) U.S. banana executives were hesitant to recognize the crisis facing the Gros Michel, according to John Soluri, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of Banana Cultures, an upcoming book on the fruit. "Many of them waited until the last minute."

Denial in the face of a clear and present ecological danger. We've seen this before.

Aged Old Code

Old wine or whisky can become more complex and interesting. Old code becomes insecure:

Or at least become more vulnerable. I've recently been helping a client with their secure coding initiative and as a result I've been reading Mike Howard and Dave LeBlanc's Writing Secure Code which reminded me of an important aspect of maintaining a secure code base which often gets overlooked: That is that as code ages it becomes insecure.

— Evolve or Die, by arthur, Emergent Chaos, August 29, 2007 at 7:47 AM

The state of the art in discovering vulnerabilities advances. I remember when nobody worried much about buffer overflows. Related to that, programs get used in environments they weren't written for. Who really cared about buffer overflows on the early Internet when just getting it working for a few researchers was the goal? Related to that, the number of people motivated to break code keeps increasing, especially those with monetary motivation. With enough eyes are bugs are shallow also means with enough eyes all vulnerabilities become easy to find. Or, in this postmodern world, even computer programs are largely what people perceive them to be, and those perceptions change.

For example, Jeff Pulver perceives Facebook's video messages as videophone. How long before somebody perceives it as a phishing method? Where there's humans there's humint.

-jsq

Terrorism, Lightning, and Bloomberg

Sometimes a politician says something so sensible you wonder why everbody doesn't say it:

There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life.

You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist.

In terms of what you as individual on the streets should worry about is not whether the person sitting next to you on the subway is a terrorist. The likelihood of that is so small it is not something you should worry about.

—Buzz Over Mayor’s ‘Get a Life’ Remark, By Sewell Chan, Empire Zone, June 6, 2007,  9:46 am

The outlet that originally quoted Bloomberg, wcbstv.com, quotes several people as saying terrorism is a big threat. However, it also points out that New York City is the safest city in America, with violent crime in general low and decreasing. Maybe if that TV station and others reported that more often, instead of constant, irrational fear, more people would understand what Bloomberg is saying.

Norms-Based iTunes?

Ben Hyde dug up a paper about Norms-Based Intellectual Property Systems: The Case of French Chefs, which discusses the issues involved in the recent case of the French chefs, even though it was published before that foofaraw. This paper makes me wonder if that's what Apple is doing:

With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the situation with Apple's new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still have a user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.

We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and e-mail addresses in the files, and we've found corroboration of the find at TUAW, as well. But there's more to the story: Apple embeds your account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free songs. Previously it wasn't much of a big deal, since no one could imagine users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since it could theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner. It must also be kept in mind that this kind of information could be spoofed.

— Apple hides account info in DRM-free music, too, By Ken Fisher, ars technica, May 30, 2007 - 01:39PM CT

The ars technica article goes on to recommend a trivial way to keep the music and ditch the identifiers, and points out that the presence of such an identifier on somebody else's disk doesn't necessarily prove copyright infringement. But maybe that's not what Apple is really after. Maybe it's so people will know that Apple could know, and other people could know, where you got your music. Like French chefs know where other chefs got certain recipes. Norms-based iTunes?

-jsq

Cooking Property?

What happens when one famous chef copies another's recipe?

The place is agog at the effrontery of Vigneron, since they believe he has brazenly ripped off one of chef Wylie Dufresne’s best-known dishes. By the looks of a feature in the current issue of Wired, Vigneron has created a showpiece dish of a “cyber egg,” the yolk of which is made of carrot-cardamom purée, surrounded by a white of hardened coconut milk. Very interesting, given that almost the exact same dish (minus a garnish of foam and carrot) has been served often at wd-50, is featured on the restaurant’s website, and, we are told by members of the staff, has been eaten by Vigneron at least twice. “It’s one thing to be inspired by a dish and to change the flavors to make it your own,” says line cook John Bignelli. “But to just steal everything? How can you do that?” Dufresne, staying above the fray, declined to comment.

— Did Marcel From ‘Top Chef’ Really Just Rip Off Wylie Dufresne? Grub Street, New York Magazine, 15 May 2007

You get a lot of commentary.