Back to discussion of the nature of things. Not so recently have I become interested in clandestine activities.




One could define clandestine activities as those that are undertaken with actor, actions, reason and existence concealed or obfuscated. Organized clandestine activity is one where human and other resources are pooled and organized to perform advanced massive and pervasive clandestine activities. Clandestine organizations and clandestine free agents are groups and individuals who perform organized clandestine activities. There could also be unorganized activities such as accidental activity. Clandestine activity by high technology: wire tap, ether/wifi sniff. Data mining records Clandestine activity by process:




Why the formality?
Because I find myself spending far too much time thinking about my coworkers reading my emails at work, my boss reading my personal emails, my friends, my wife, my parents reading my emails, my coworkers changing my code seconds before I check them into SVN…


So, what are all these clandestine activities and what difference does it make? Let us dissect the above paragraph into its constituencies:


Monitoring: secret collection of information: boss hires someone to read my personal email. To me, I am okay with people being aware of my personal activities. As long as it is does not materially detrimental to my quality of life. I think corporation law protecting secrecy is the minimal level of protection we have.


If I have stated that I want something private, then it should be protected as my personal privacy.
If I have taken sufficient measures to conceal it then it should be private.


For example: mail service provider instrumenting a password and my using a password on my email account demonstrates both intent and effort in hiding my personal emails. Please do not read them! It should be protected just as much as a stocker looking through my blinds which also shows desire and effort towards hiding something.


Reaction: acting on the information gathered under fake reason: boss plans to have an important meeting on the day I scheduled an interview at another company before I ask for that day off for a dentist appointment. Information asymmetry here causes employee to be at an disadvantage. Setting up a DUI check point to block bank robber’s escape route.


Masquerading: acting under the identity of an actual person or entity: eg coworker changes code in my work directory with out asking me. Stealing and defaming my identity. I feel this should be against rule of law and rule of companies. This can effectively kills a person’s identity and his reputation. Doing this is like putting poison in his drink just before he swallows it. This should not be allowed.


Subjects of organized clandestine activities are of two types, some are effectively forced to participate (you cannot buy a house unless you share your information with all our bank networks…), British surveillance system of cameras. Others participate amicably because they do not care or participate in the clandestine activities. And lastly, there are those that accept that they are subjects of clandestine activities without participating in it. I cannot imagine who wants that, but perhaps I can be persuaded that this is indeed an acceptable, and indeed more optimal, society like I accept the police been given the ability to legally (but completely publicly) use force and sometimes deadly force.


There are several issues that needs to be thought through.

• Personal Privacy is a person’s property, the loss of privacy has money (among other) value.
• Personal Privacy is a person’s right like speech.
• Personal Privacy is a mechanism important to capitalism or other aspects of economy or society like competition is. Or is it a bad thing like prostitution?
• Is complete Personal Privacy effectively impossible in a modern society?
• Is @usps.com an option? snooping my email can be big an offense as stealing my physical snail mail.
• What if I invested $5million of my own money in a company? Would I want the employee’s personal emails be read and reread by several trusted parties?

It is nearing July 4th this 12th year into our new millennium, I am reading a blog entry of my own from 2006ish talking about this exact issue with exactly same complaints that my email is being read and my code is being messed with.


I wish I could come to terms with these thoughts! They have consumed far too much of my time…


Happy July 4th!

It’s been more than two years since I discussed the 6-2-10 system. Since then I have become aware of some research regarding productivity in a revenue optimizing society. in 1909 Sidney Chapman apparently researched this and found that very large organizations function best with 8-hr work days.

But to be realistic, the people who service our society the most often work very very long hours. Many of them argue that working longer hours really produces bigger highs and more total results. Brilliance in human brain seem often to be inspired by fatigue, hallucination, and as Steve Jobs would have it, some LSD or other mind-altering drugs; Perhaps some products of brain or mind requires certain amount disability(Beethoven, Hawkins?), requires derangement (perhaps myself?), and perhaps requires amputation(司马迁)

Not having enough knowledge about this whole field of study on worker productivity, nor enough knowledge about the physiology of working, nor any knowledge about the psychology of productivity, I would dare only endeavor further in parameterizing the system for the masses.

Obviously, as alluded before, 6-2-10 can as well be a four shift work day of 6-12-18-24, or six shift work days of 4 hours each: 4-8-12-16-20-24; However, one would have to agree that too many shifts leads to too much organizational efforts to arrange all these shifts. Commuting to work for 4 hours and then commute back seems silly. The changing of guards also require some time, so a good compromise for a tightly integrated urban society is 6-12-18-24 system with a half hour break. Effectively 5.5 hour work each day and half an hour used to switch people in and out of office. For the sake of brevity I will refer to the second system as the p6 system (The boundaries are only at products of 6)

Another advantage of the p6 system is that for the most part, anybody in any shift will have an extended period of time both during day time and during night time free to do other things. the 6-2-10 system will have a shift that sees very small amount of night.

A second advantage of the p6 system is that if some one were to plan to work for 12 hours, it is built into the system. Myself I work 12 hour days regularly, and from an recent articles, it would appear that many Americans do as well. So if the prevailing desire is to do 12 hours a day, the P6 system automatically allows them to do this.

The reality of myself is that I actually prefer quiet time to work, so an effective sub-system is for 12-hour companies to buy room for 1/2 of the company for 12 and room for all of the company only for 6 hours of the day. This way, early shift comes in and works for 6 hours, quietly, without large meetings, then the meetings of the day takes place during the middle 6 hours when all of the company is at work. After the meetings the early shift goes home and the late shifts works its 6 hour of quite work time.

But to be a united company, one would probably want a one-system-company. There seem to be something weird about a 12-hour person speaking to a 6-hour person… At least my current company, people who stick around longer seem to get more say in things and is well liked by higher ups, without respect to the actual quality and benefit of their work.

 
Morale would be much higher, as we get more personal time to take care of our own family, do fun things, smoke weed, farm weed, or what ever.

Hmm, the demands on the general upstanding nature of citizens are higher in this system. Because having more free time doesn’t mean we spend it scheming on how to over throw the government or how to take over other countries… The extra time needs to be spent on activities that improve our quality of our own lives, our family, other peoples lives, and quality of society.

While it is not absolutely necessary, nor was it the original motivation of the 6-2-10 system for the productivity per productive resource (person/office/computer/etc) to be higher, my expectation is for it to be higher. That is, I really feel that a focused 5-hour work day can and will be much more effective than a long 12-hour day.

Life is short, we should try to do more in less time to extend the effective longevity.

ugh! Feel kind of low having attempted to gracefully sent off two co-founders from evening of fairly heated discussion of our startup ideas.

There was a moment of genius though. There are two kinds of people one would want to recruit if one were to startup a company in one’s spare time, while working diligently, efficiently, and full time, about  hours a day (sorry, just covering ass in case you are my boss or co-worker, and these are the honest truth).

Once, I had a great boss. great guy, smart, funny, easygoing, and very handsome, impeccably dressed, hair-gelling, hybrid-driving, latte-drinking, Stanford PhD’ing, boss… He has this constant preoccupation with recruiting “superstars”. At the time, I didn’t really have any appreciation for this concept of what a superstar is and what  he does and why my boss really really wants to recruit them. (I mean, weren’t I super enough for you? ;~(….

So now come a time when I consider organizing my own thing. and suddenly it hits me. There was a second type of recruiting that he did, which was that he had a lot of cheap engineers (one of which I was, apparently… not as cheap as most, but still, not superstar pay-grade at the time). There were quite a lot of cheap labors in our group under my boss’s organization. And constantly he seeks superstars.

When it come time for me to make these considerations, suddenly I feel that I have bifurcated desire. One the one hand. I really want to have a coupla people who doesn’t need a lot of pampering (and salary/options, but let that be said parenthetically). You know, the guys who are experienced enough to just hunker down and type out code, and doesn’t demand being praised/bonused/paraded in front of the team for all the accomplishments.

But on the other hand, I find myself unthinkingly wanting. I want a person who takes larger than deserved pride in even one line of code written. I want a guy who types

and stands up and raises his fist and says to the team: “Hello!” as if he has lifted the world and spun it around the sun.

I am uncertain where this desire stems. Perhaps due to my own vanity. Certainly there are times when I write a recursion and feel like I am one of a thousand people in the world who can do that. And be that as it possibly may(perhaps around 50k? Interview question after solving a problem: estimate the number of people who in similar situation can write that code), the swell of pride and happiness and relief and forgetting all else, so overwhelming, so high, better than drugs, and cheaper too… 

I want a person like that. Because we would agree on the same thing and s/he would shine and design things according to principles, efficiency, robustness, maintainability, marketability, big-O’s, k-factors, r-naughts, and whatnots. And it would be a superstar who can make things happen when I need it and the way I need it, and most important to me: Make the world spin for us.

Thus, this leaves us with two types of recruitment, forsaking many acceptable social standards and enforcible laws: Cheap labor and Super stars!

• I need Cheap Labor, and
• I need Superstars!

And who amongst you think you don’t, must be running a fool’s errand.

Anyway, the core issue here is actually not the existence of this bifurcation but what is fair compensation. All men are created equal, and for the most part, on the average, they work as hard as one another. And I expect each to even if they are cheap or super.

And the question remaining frozen in the airspace in my living room: should they be compensated differently??

The San Francisco Bay Area is a culturally very diverse place. I live here and I feel like a normal person.

Until I saw this video today about this video Ad. The CNN video news is about Pete Hoekstra running a political AD featuring a Chinese women thanking America for allowing her to be rich. Pete, resorting to this racially targeted Ad and name calling by registering a domain name called debbiespendit and petespenditnot.com. And the


Okay, so… I wasn’t particularly insulted by this blatantly racist video. I mean, my quality of life is so good that I have become complacent about racial issues surrounding me and my people in the United States. In particular, I find that I don’t find it insulting, that it is often said that “The Chinese are stealing American jobs!” President Obama says it, Gingrich says it, Romney says it, everybody who’s any body says it.


Let’s see now, why is the Chinese “stealing” American jobs? I thought the expression “stealing” is the action of not paying enough $ for product or services?!


As a Chinese I think I should at least object to this racial attack saying Chinese is doing something bad to American when no such action is taken, at least not at the scale that these people suggests.


As an American, I should object to this because the Chinese CANNOT “steal” my job! And if they can, then I can do something about it. I just cannot believe this! This is absolutely the worst thing to be saying as an American! 


Let’s become competative! let’s beat them! let’s work harder, let’s make better products and design better things. Let us work better together as one people. Let us not blame the Chinese for doing that, let’s blame ourselves for not doing that better!


GOD! I am so fucking insulted!!!!!


I feel so ashamed!!!!


And worst of all, it took a stupid fucking CNN news piece to point out that for so many years, with the president and all those so called “leaders of America” calling me TO MY FACE, through TV and video and all media, that as a Chinese I steal! and that as an American I allow myself to be stolen from and not realizing that I am being spoken to. As myself, I am horrified at my ability to think critically.




UGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Today, a real estate financial agent that I’ve been working for several weeks emailed me, sent me an email saying that he has no record of my data.

I must have sent him several months of my bank statements, my mortgage statements, insurance papers, etc. All the docs needed to get the refi that I’ve been trying to get for the past few months. And after all that, he tells me that he has not received any thing from me. I am very upset at this.

I look in my own records and find that I cannot find my own emails to him (gmail, have been very trust worthy in recent years). Records of my phone call to him discussing this case has also vanished. Has my account been hacked? Has white supremacists haked both mine and his emails and removed records so that white people can get in on these exceptionally low rates never seen before in several generations? Is this all a trick to guarantee financial advantage to descendants of Caucasians for generations to come?

Why do these ideas pop in my head when ever an inexplicably disadvantageous thing happen to me?

Could it be a hacker from my current bank? The bank stands to make a lot of money by keeping my high rates in their system? Why do I think there is bigger power at work every time my email gets erased??!!

Let me take pause…

Today, we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. day!

Today we are made to share in his dream, a dream of a world in which all men are created equal:
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true….
…will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
…will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last!
Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

And dare I dream of human rights and civil liberties? Dare I dream of privacy and free will? Dare I dream that we will have more interesting things to do than to hack other people’s computer accounts and to blog about being hacked by other people?

I have a drea…zzzzzzzZZZ zzzz..z.z..zzzz…. Hmmm, nationalized email service where breaking into email account breaks federal law….all emails are delivered by post office systems… There is such comfort in centralized monolithic guaranteed rule based systems, and yet, I realize that this run opposing to Internet which is free, open, unoptimized, and insecure since it’s inception… oh, wait, let’s rollbak to MLK’s dream, lest this turn into one horrifying nightmare in which we denature Internet as we know it….

🙂

Read an article from slashdot about some predictions for the next 100 years. Notably #17 states that marriage will be come a contract that renews annually. I had thought of a similar idea in a previous post requiring renwal of the marriage license. The importent thing to notice is that this idea’s main proponent wants it to become socially aceptable for two people to say “we think we can live happy lives for the next 5 years, but not sure about after that”.  The annual contract may be far more practical than a 5-year term that I was envisioning.

I am trying very hard to keep the image of Robert Ebert after his throat cancer surgery out of my head as I sit down and type my thoughts on this movie. I have been having a throat pain on and off for several months now and it is scaring the shit out of me. And why do I taste salt every time I drink water?

Anyway, another image that I have trouble keeping out of my head is Clint Eastwood, the director of this film, chewing the words: “He is a fucking cock sucker!!!”

The simple days… The really simple days when FBI originally started, in the first decade of the 20th century, things seem so simple then. The cars had simple engines… the liquor was hard, and the vegies all organic. And you could meet women in a club and they would offer to warm your bed for ya.

It makes me reflect on today, we are into second decade of the 21st century, at the end of which, will I look back and think, “wow… those were the simple days, they measured computer performance in peta-flops.”, and they didn’t even have to sign a pre-date to go on a date.

Anyway, snap back to reality, wow! I thought half way into this movie, this whole country is created not by white men, it was created by homosexual men! The film portrays J. Edgar Hoover, founding director of the FBI and Clyde Tolson, founding Associate director of the same TLA as homosexual couples. Various reports (wiki) quotes Clint Eastwood saying that he chose the script because it was not homosexual! But that was clearly a statement of the opposite, that the script did not focus on his homosexuality.

Was the script a PSA (public service announcement) for personal fitness? Because Clyde got a stroke for saying that he doesn’t like to exercise and Hoover dies hours after revealing that he wasn’t working out either to Clyde.

Because it wasn’t a promo piece for the FBI either. Though it did show that the underlines, the nameless agents do do good work that hoover takes credit for.

I don’t know why, but I have a fairly positive impression of the FBI, despite my deep seeded hatred for spying of all form be it organized or disorganized, effective or ineffective, and government sanctioned or not. So the movie is a slight understatement there for me too.

Perhaps it is for the best that the movie does not go into great detail about the things that we find lacking. The details of his extortions, the details of his relationship with Clyde, the details of all the political struggles that he won.

Btw, did Rober Ebert get throat cancer from HPV when he had oral sex with his black wife or through his promiscuous Hollywood lifestyle?… sorry, my most feared thoughts escape my skull some times…

The movie overall felt like it fits the demographics–most of the people in the audience, me excluded, were older couples same age as the dying Hoover. People from a simpler times… like when in a hundred years they’ll complain about lack of details: “oh man, that old geezer is posting into a blog about his java code about such a simple system called Hadoop. That’s soooo simple and unscalable.”

I recently received a bounced email on my gmail account. It would appear some body at this IP-address (192.83.180.224) attempted to send an email as me to jobs@selabs.com. that IP-address is in the range 192.83.180.* registered to “Ministry of Education Computer Center, Taipei Taiwan” There is a middle man (87.98.235.52) which is ovh.net a polish web hosting company located in France.

I’m actually kind of flattered that somebody from taiwan’s ministry of education wanted to send email as me. But I do not appear to have any apparent relevant skills for the company selabs.com. This is very odd. I should ask my taiwaneese roommate if he’s playing a prank on me, or if I should ask friends at gmail how serious this is to my online identity?

from:		Mail Delivery Subsystem mailer-daemon@googlemail.com
to:		huan.chang@gmail.com
date:		Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 12:45 PM
subject:		Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
mailed-by:		googlemail.com
:		Important mainly because of the people in the conversation.

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:


    jobs@206.65.164.155


Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.1.1 Mail Refused – Address <jobs@selabs.com> Recipient Unknown (state 14).


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Are some restaurants out there in California still charging 9.4% tax because they haven’t reprogrammed their cash registers?

I found at least one.

The sales tax in Menlo Park should be 8.25%. The new rates effective Oct. 1 2011 are listed can be found on this page.