Electronic device security traveling in China

by philg

There are a lot of dire warnings about traveling to China with a smartphone and laptop. Examples:

Counterexample:

Is the situation truly riskier than in the U.S.? What special tools do attackers in China have that couldn’t be deployed at a Starbucks in Peoria?

I’m not worried about someone from the Chinese government reading all of my email. Any opinions that I have about China and the Chinese government are already published here on this blog (and they’re mostly wrong! In 2003, I predicted that the Chinese would be able to make and export a basic automobile for $2,000 to $3,000 (at most $4,200 in today’s mini-dollars). As of 2016, there was a $2,400 Chinese four-seat car, but it lacks A/C and other “basics”. Today there is a $9,000 Chinese made four-door electric car.)

I wouldn’t want someone transferring money out of my online banking accounts, using my credit cards, etc., however. Given two-factor authentication with text messages to my phone, can people truly do that without having control of my mobile number?

Update: Based on Denis’s comment below, I updated the “SIM PIN” on my iPhone away from the Verizon factory default. I hope that is what he meant by “Make sure your sim is locked.”

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Why do we put tourists through immigration interviews when our borders are open to asylum-seekers?

by philg

On a typical cruise, passengers hand over their passports at the beginning of the trip and the ship’s staff handles any and all immigration bureaucracy. The countries being visited rely on the cruise line to authenticate people and to take at least most of the visitors away.

When we arrived in Canada this standard practice was observed. The Canadians presumably had an opportunity to inspect a list of people on board, but they didn’t invest time and money to talk to each tourist and/or crew member.

It was a different story coming into U.S. waters. A group of immigration officials were flown up from Anchorage to Barrow, one of the most remote towns on our planet. They proceeded by tender boat to join us on board. The ship set up an assembly line so that La Migra could talk to each passenger at least briefly, scan and offer to stamp passports, and then go back to Anchorage by tender boat, taxi, and airplane. It was a huge waste of time and money for everyone involved.

This “screen everyone” practice might have made sense 30 years ago. But with families stepping over the southern border of the U.S. and saying “I am entitled to asylum because I live in a place that is almost as violent as Baltimore or New Orleans,” what is the point? Anyone willing to spin a yarn of violence and suffering can get set up for three generations of public housing, free health care via Medicaid, food stamps, and free smartphone. So the point of the passport check cannot be to make sure that people will go home. Anyone from our cruise could have asked for asylum just the same as someone who migrated up from Central America.

Since 9/11, a good catch-all explanation for apparently wasteful government spending is “because terrorism”. I don’t think that is the reason for screening every passenger on a cruise visiting a U.S. port, though. German senior citizens do not fit the profile of a typical terrorist. The agents who see people face to face do not seem more likely to spot a terrorist than a person with a computer looking at all of the passport data provided by the cruise line.

Readers: Now that there are so many ways to stay in the U.S. forever (and at taxpayer expense for multiple decades), is this screening process obsolete? If complete face-to-face screening is a such a good idea, why don’t the Canadians do it?

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Female infanticide disproves sociobiology?

by philg

Wikipedia says “Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to examine and explain social behavior in terms of evolution.”

One of the things that we learned about on our Northwest Passage cruise was the historical practice of female infanticide among Eskimos/Inuits. When food got scarce, female infants were at risk. The explanation given in museums and by guides was that boys would grow up into adult male hunters who could take care of their elderly parents.

From The North West Passage Exploration Anthology (a report from John Franklin from his 1825 trip):

The difficulty of procuring nourishment frequently induces the women of this tribe to destroy their female children. Two pregnant women of the party then at the fort, made known their intention of acting on this inhuman custom, though Mr. Dease threatened them with our heaviest displeasure if they put it into execution: we learned that, after they left us, one actually did destroy her child; the infant of the other woman proved to be a boy.

If the goal of an animal is propagating his/her/zir genes, this does not seem to make sense. A typical human female reproduces, thus passing on her parents’ genes. A typical human male has no offspring (polygamy is the natural human state, it seems; see “The era of monogamous long-term marriage was a brief interruption” within Real World Divorce).

The period of life in which the son will be potentially useful won’t likely start until after the parents are beyond reproductive age (and therefore whether they live or die has minimal effect on their reproductive success).

Readers: Is the existence of female infanticide across a range of cultures a simple proof that sociobiology is wrong?

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Shanghai has already accomplished what will take Californians more than 4 years

by philg

I’m planning a trip to Shanghai, November 13-24.

From the Okura Garden web site:

In accordance with the Shanghai municipal environment regulations, unless requested by staying hotel guest, the hotel no longer proactively provides single-use toiletry amenities such as toothbrush, comb, razor, nail file and shoe mitt from July 1st, 2019. If you have further inquiry please contact the hotel’s guest services.

I think this proves my theory that it will be the Chinese who will save Planet Earth. Californians will need until 2024 to achieve this goal (previous post).

Separately, who wants to get together in Shanghai, Suzhou, or Hangzhou?

What about hotels? Okura Garden comes up as “best value” in the booking engines. Is it better to stay right on the Bund? I will be visiting NYU Shanghai across the river, but mostly hitting all of the tourist sites, museums, etc.

(Airfares to China show the absurd lack of competition for domestic travel. The basic fare plus tax from Boston to Shanghai, 14+ hours of flight time, is $590 (United, with a connection) or $640 (Hainan, nonstop).)

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Why would isolated Eskimos get colds?

by philg

Welcome to cold and flu season, especially for those of you with kids in school.

The prevailing wisdom about colds is that the virus is passed from person to person, right? “Why can’t we cure the common cold?” (Guardian, 2017, about “a breakthrough”):

The only failsafe means of avoiding a cold is to live in complete isolation from the rest of humanity.

Eskimos in the pre-machine age came pretty close this “complete isolation” and yet, in The North-West Passage Roald Amundsen reported from Gjöa Haven, about as isolated as humans can be:

The return of the Eskimo again imparted a lively and variegated aspect to our little harbour. They came on board, as a rule, generally of an evening in great crowds to visit us or to introduce new friends. They were always gay and happy, and we became very good friends with them. It has always been believed that the air in the Polar regions is absolutely pure and free from bacilli; this, however, is, to say the least, doubtful, in any case as far as the regions around King William Land are concerned, for here the Eskimo nearly every winter were visited with quite an epidemic of colds. Some of them had such violent attacks that I was even afraid of inflammation of the lungs, and as nearly every one of them contracted the illness, it must in all probability have been occasioned by infection. Happily those on board the “Gjöa” escaped, but we certainly took due precautions. We had great trouble to put a stop to the spitting habit. The Eskimo are very bad in this respect, but when we had them some time under treatment they improved and paid more attention to our prohibition.

A bit later in the same book:

Summer is, one may say, rapidly succeeded by winter; the lakes freeze over, and the snow falls; but with the Eskimo there is a short period which may be described as their autumn, and as their most dismal season, just before the ice is thick enough to be used as building material. Superstition prevents them from lighting fires indoors. Their homes are, therefore, miserable in the temperature which then prevails, and they live in a raw cold, damp atmosphere, in which all, without exception, contract severe colds.

There was some travel among Eskimo communities back then, of course, but it often took so long that people would have gotten over their colds by the time they showed up at the destination settlement.

Related:

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Why we still need Microsoft

by philg

I wanted to save a PowerPoint presentation about a recent Northwest Passage cruise to a series of HD-resolution (1920×1080) JPEGs for direct display from a USB stick to a TV.

PowerPoint will let you do this, but only at 1280×720(!) resolution.

After a brief search, I found an official Microsoft document on this subject: “How to change the export resolution of a PowerPoint slide”.

Instead of adding a dialog box to prompt the user for the desired resolution, Microsoft took the trouble to advertise a method of doing this by editing the Windows registry, complete with cautions about how “serious problems might occur” if you make any mistakes while editing said registry.

It is kind of awe-inspiring.

(How does one accomplish this goal? The advertised procedure does work and a DPI resolution of 144 results in 1920×1080 pixel JPEGs. The current version of PowerPoint included with Office 365 is 16.0. See this video tutorial if you want a little more handholding.)

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Protests against Trump are really protests against non-elite voters?

by philg

“1, 2, 3, 4, Trump Can’t Rule Us Anymore: With impeachment looming, it’s time to take to the streets again.” (NYT, October 21, 2019):

All over the world right now, outraged citizens are taking to the streets. Mass protests in Hong Kong have been going on for months, at one point drawing about a quarter of the territory’s population.

So as Donald Trump’s sneering lawlessness and stupefying corruption continue to escalate, it’s confounding, at least to me, that Americans aren’t taking to the streets en masse.

“Want Trump to Go? Take to the Streets: Another moment for public protest has arrived.” (NYT, a day earlier), by David Leonhardt, “a former Washington bureau chief for the Times”:

Fortunately, some progressives understood that politics isn’t only an inside game. The outside game — of public protest and grass-roots lobbying — matters, too. … On the day after Trump’s inauguration, some four million Americans took to the streets for Women’s Marches …

Do you remember the images showing throngs of people taking to the streets for the Women’s March? The size of the crowds, especially compared with Trump’s inauguration, reinforced the fact that most Americans rejected Trumpism.

The comments to these articles are packed with complaints that 48 percent of Americans elected the object of the proposed protests and sometimes express contempt for these 48 percent, e.g., as believing Christians, racists, etc.

Since the people who voted for Trump still support him, isn’t the proposed protest best understood as by coastal elites against the non-elites whose right to vote they forgot to take away? (and the protest is against the non-elites being able to vote in what they perceive to be their own interests)

Why use Trump as a scapegoat? If people who live in New York City feel oppressed by those who live and vote in Georgia, Iowa, Wisconsin, etc., shouldn’t they be able to name their true oppressors and protest against them? Maybe demand that voting be restricted to those with a liberal arts degree! Why should people without college-level training in the humanities be choosing a government?

Related:

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Just in time for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders: a bigger Gulfstream

by philg

From NBAA… “Gulfstream Ups the Ante with New G700 Flagship”:

Gulfstream Aerospace unveiled the G700 as its newest flagship this evening at its NBAA-BACE static display at Las Vegas Henderson Executive Airport. Its latest offering combines the best features of its G650ER and recently certified G500/600, resulting in a $75 million twinjet with an NBAA IFR range of at least 7,500 nm. The G700—available for viewing in cabin mockup form this week at Henderson—has a five-living-area cabin with 20 large, G650-size windows, providing a strong competitive response that industry-watchers were widely expecting.

Though touted as an all-new airplane, the fly-by-wire G700 is actually a 10-foot stretched derivative of the G650, with which it also shares the same nose and wing.

The aft section of the mockup contains a master bedroom with a full-size bed and dresser, in addition to an en suite lavatory with a toilet and vanity opposite from a floor-to-ceiling storage closet.

According to Gulfstream, the G700 will have a maximum takeoff weight of 107,600 pounds and a maximum fuel load of 49,400. Balanced field length at mtow is 6,250 feet, while the landing distance is 2,500 feet at an as-yet-unspecified “typical landing weight.”

One issue with planes that weigh more than 100,000 lbs. (fully loaded) is the requirement that operators put passengers through TSA-style screening. What’s the point of flying private if you have to let TSA workers try on your clothes?

It seems as though the fix might be in, however. From an obscure TSA document from 2017:

Utilizing the regulatory framework allowing the Administrator in 49
CFR 1544.101(f)(2) to establish an alternative program, the TSA should allow airplanes with Maximum Take Off Weight at or below 120,150 pounds to comply with the TFSSP as a means of compliance with the PCSSP in the near term. Long term, the TSA should pursue rulemaking to update the PCSSP weight threshold to 120,150 pounds.

Now we know the weight of the Gulfstream G800!

When will the peasants riot?

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MIT nerdism is genetic

by philg

“Sibling surprise” (Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine) is fun for people who believe in the religion of genetics. Siblings reared apart were brought together as adults by DNA testing. It turned out that they had both gone to MIT:

[the brother] I had always believed that all of my potential came from my genetic blueprint. The newfound knowledge of Freedom’s and my biological roots has reinforced this. Many of my traits and interests seemed to come out of the blue, unrelated to the farm where I grew up. All of these attributes map to Freedom or my biological family. Every question I’ve ever had about my origin story has been answered.

Also in the MIT-specific portion of the same issue….

A celebration of Margaret Hamilton for (a) inventing “software engineering,” and (b) inventing the term “software engineer.” (The earliest references that I could find in the IEEE literature to “software engineering” were from the late 1960s, but the term is used as though it had already been in widespread use and would be well-understood. In the ACM literature, an early reference is from Alan Perlis in 1969, but again he uses the term without introduction, explanation, or credit. A “NATO and Software Engineering” article from 1969 talks about a 1967 study group recommending “a working conference on Software Engineering,” but no individual is credited with coining the term.)

A two-page obituary of Patrick Winston, an AI pioneer and one of the greatest teachers ever in MIT EECS.

A book by Susan Hockfield, former president of MIT, is reviewed: “Several of her examples are projects led by female scientists.”

A sad litany of death notices beginning with the class of 1970 and going backward. Apparently, none of us should count on living past age 70.

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Demanding more refugee migrants in Arlington, Virginia

by philg

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (founded with private money to help Jews settle in the U.S.; currently running with tax dollars to bring in non-Jews) helped set up a protest at National Airport in Arlington, Virginia: “Waiting for Refugees Who Are Not Coming”. They demand at least 95,000 migrants right now.

What if the refugee-migrants did show up? Can they sign up for a taxpayer-subsidized house? From the Arlington ministry of housing:

No. The Housing Choice Voucher Program wait list is closed and we are not accepting new applications. We do not anticipate that the waitlist will be opened for several years. …. The average wait for a voucher is approximately 5 years. There are many families and individuals who have applied for housing assistance and are on the waiting list for the Housing Choice Voucher Tenant-Based program.

Maybe things are better in the semi-private sector? “Arlington’s Affordable Housing Crisis” (Arlington Magazine, February 19, 2019):

Arlington’s affordable housing shortage has grown increasingly dire in recent years. And that’s before Amazon announced plans to bring 25,000 new jobs—and more people needing places to live—to the area.

A county report issued in 2017 surmised that only about 8.2 percent of Arlington’s housing stock—9,369 units—was affordable for households earning less than 60 percent of [area median income].

What about a little farther away? Somewhere else in the Greater D.C. area? “Northern Virginia’s growing crisis in affordable housing” (The Arlington Catholic Herald, August 30, 2019):

Years ago, people with low incomes could easily find a market-rate affordable apartment, that is, a dwelling place in a privately owned complex that had relatively low monthly rent because of the age of the building, lack of amenities or a less desirable location. An apartment is considered affordable if people making 60 percent of the area median income spend 30 percent or less of their income on rent.

Now, those market-rate affordable apartments, also known as MARKs, are nearly gone. Officials in Arlington and Alexandria say they have lost approximately 29,000 MARKs in the past 19 years mostly due to rent increases.

Maybe it was better back in 2013 before Donald Trump ruined everything? “3,600 apply for 122 new Arlington apartments” (Washington Post, 2013).

So… the HIAS folks are standing in a town where, due to population growth and consequent market demand, Americans can no longer afford to live. After commuting in through a multi-hour traffic jam, they’re holding signs demanding the importation of migrants who will need to compete for the same housing supply and highway capacity.

Related:

  • What were garages for people born in the mid-20th century will be homes for their children and grandchildren (NYT on California)
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