Our daughter was born on Sunday, May 30, at 9:32 AM
Emilene Mnemosyne Sniffen
8 lbs, 15.2 oz
20.5 inches long, with a 37 cm head
We spent 48 hours in the hospital recovering, and now are at home with the most adorable baby in the world!
Names are important. Your name (or at least, my name) tells a story about who you are, so it is no surprise that Major Life-changing Events often change our names.
As an example, I will trace the history of my own name, since it’s the one I know best:
When I was born, I was named Katherine Hanley Allen, but called Katie. Katie was my mother’s vision for me: she knew she was going to have a daughter, and that was her daughter’s name. She wanted me to have a long name, though, so she was considering Kathleen, to honor her mother-in-law’s Irish heritage. Several other women in my family were Catherine or Kathryn or Cathryn, though, so she compromised to Katherine, and I was given my grandmother’s maiden name, Hanley, as my middle name.
When I went to college, my name changed—not legally, but through a sequence of accidents I went from being “Katie” to “Kat”. That changed how people interacted with me. My family mostly still calls me “Katie”, or sometimes “Kate” (or, in one inexplicable case, “Katrina”) but my friends, colleagues, and in-laws call me “Kat”. (Some of my colleagues call me “Katherine”, which is in itself a reflection of how we interact—a bit more formally than a very very short name would allow!) Occasionally, a stranger will call me “Kathy”, which automatically loses them some of my respect—it’s not my name, so they lose points.
My name changed again when I married: I appended my husband’s surname to my name, turning mine into a middle name, and became Katherine Hanley Allen Sniffen. It serves to reflect the change in my life: still myself, but now part of a new family.
And now, with the birth of my daughter, there are new names all around. She is named for my great-grandmother Mary Emalene, the only girl of 9, and for Brian’s great-great-aunt Amelia, and for the goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne. But Brian and I get new names, too—we are still ourselves, but we are also “Mommy” and “Daddy”. That may be the most dramatic change of all.
One of these things is not like the others. One of these things is not the same:
- Ask Alice to…
- Be drawn into…
- Call for…
- Disavow…
- Lift…
- Negotiate…
- Oversee the flow…
- Pledge…
- Press Bob to…
- Recognize…
- Represent…
- Revoke its charter.
Which one of these things is not like the others? Which one of these things is not the same?
Robert Graham writes that cyberwar is fiction:
“Cyberwar” and “cyberweapons” are fiction. The conflicts between nation states in cyberspace are nothing like warfare, and the tools hackers use are nothing like weapons. Putting “cyber” in front a something is just way for people to grasp technical concepts, the analogies quickly break down, and are useless when taken too far (such as a “cyber disarmament treaty”). Unfortunately, it’s the clueless people who believe in these analogies that are driving national policy.
So far, so ordinary anti-cyber screed. Graham is right that analogies have limits; that all abstractions leak; and that “cyberweapon” is a word that describes very little. But then he moves into believing a popular myth about the military—one so popular that many in the military believe it themselves:
Moreover, the military is very goal driven. They want weapons that have a specific effect. That’s not how hacking works. Hacking is opportunistic. For example, let’s say that you want to attack Iran. You might give your cyberwarriors the task of taking out their radar. That’s not something the cyberwarriors could do: chances are good that the exploits they have will have no effect on Iranian radar computers.
This, and the associated bigger-is-better idea, certainly exist in many government acquisitions shops. That’s how you get the F-14, a plane so big it has to be folded to be put away. That’s the approach chosen by every leader whose effectiveness can be measured as a scalar. A strategic bombing campaign is measured by its destruction; strategic bomber commanders therefore want big bombs, many bombs per bomber, and many bombers. More bigger weapons will give more effectiveness at a narrow mission.
But there are already many more complicated missions undertaken by the military, missions whose success cannot be judged on a scalar. Recent events suggest counterinsurgency, a complicated mission with no clear measure of partial or graduated success. We don’t even have to look that far: fighter planes are not measured on such a scalar. A fighter plane is effective to the extent that it can fight well against enemy fighter planes. There’s already a theory of how to compare fighter planes for effectiveness. Our plan for network defense and offense needs a similar theory of maneuverability, of excellence in competition with others, and of weapons that exist for no purpose other than to aggressively oppose the weapons of our enemies.
If the DoD is ready for a Cyber Command—and it wasn’t ready for an Air Force for decades after the introduction of military airplanes—this is what it ought to do. Not vulnerability management, though someone has to do so. Not exploit development, though that’s a good project for the industrial base. Any Cyber Command should hold as its first priority the development of an effective discipline for weapons in a networked world, the comparison of one weapon to another, and the assembly of a force able to stop other groups from doing what they want—not damaging stock markets or disabling power stations, but frustrating the national and quasinational (e.g., Nashi, Basij) network aggressors.
My employer uses Cisco’s VPN client for most remote network access. It’s a fine tool for many purposes, but I’ve found it increasingly frustrating over the last year. It has to be manually started, it kills TCP sessions and complains to the GUI when I put a machine to sleep even for a moment, and worst of all its kernel extension causes more crashes on my machine than anything else. Time to replace it. Fortunately, we also have an SSH tunnel system. It’s not good for anything but SSH port forwarding, but port forwarding is all we need.
We want an SSH tunnel that will run whenever there’s a network,
turning on as soon as I log in and restoring itself when the machine
wakes up from sleep. Apple’s launchd is designed for exactly these needs.