Island of Doctor Death

OODA Loop and John Boyd

Parker — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 01:13:49 +0000

OODA loops originated from Colonel John Boyd’s experiences as a jet-fighter pilot in the Korean War. He synthesized his observations about dogfighting with intense studies of history and philosophy to create a fascinating way of thinking about thinking. OODA stands for Observe Orient Decide Act. From what I understand of Colonel Boyd’s ideas, these processes are constantly looping around in an individual’s consciousness, with the ultimate underlying goal of each individual being to increase their capacity for independent action and therefore their chances of survival. Each phase of the cycle is informed and altered by the preceding one; a picture of reality is generated in the mind of the individual which is then used to determine actions consciously or unconsciously.

When two entities are in conflict or competition with each other, the entity which has the ability to iterate through these loops faster has superiority. But the key is not that they are just doing more things faster. Instead, if one side can iterate through their loops fast enough, self-correcting on the basis of new observations each time, they can alter the context in which their opponents are making decisions. This is known as “getting inside the opponents loop”.

Once this occurs, the opponent will be making decisions and acting on the basis of a reality which no longer exists, leading to incorrect analysis and unexpected results. By forcing the opponent into an increasingly chaotic mode where they are constantly reacting to confusing signals, they will eventually be brought into a state of total collapse.

(This is my very simplified interpretation of Boyd’s concepts, I am still trying to understand them)

A question that arises from thinking of conflict in this way is:
in the current struggle which is variously called the “Global War on Terror” or “World War IV”, which side does a better job of cycling through OODA loops?

Links:
a comprehensive site related to Boyd - make sure to check out the “Patterns of Conflict” download, a 200-page PowerPoint presentation (also in PDF version). There is a lot of fascinating material on this site; if I had understood when I was younger that this was the type of work that could be done in the military, I would have been much more likely to join. Being a physical weakling and a bit of a worm, I opted not to do that.

Wikipedia entry for Colonel Boyd.

I was first exposed to Boyd’s concepts through an unlikely source, an MSDN article by Roger Sessions in which Sessions describes how lessons from Korean War jet-fighting can be applied to enterprise architecture.

AOL Releases Search Data, Pity the Fools

Parker — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 03:42:15 +0000

This weekend the AOL research team made public a file which contains logs showing the searches performed by approximately half a million users over the course of three months. Article about it here. The AOL engineers claimed that they had anonymized the data so that the users who performed the searches could not be identified.

Unfortunately the logs themselves are still very revealing, including people’s names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses; essentially anything that an AOL user could have entered into the search form is in the log.

Think about it: could someone who knows you identify you by looking at your history of searches? Sure. A lot people do searches on their own names just out of curiosity. So then your name would appear in this log along with all other searches done by that searcher. Of course, we couldn’t tell for sure that it was you that searched for that rather embarrassing genre of porn, just that it was someone who knew you by name.

But let’s say that someone also knew that you took a vacation recently in Barbados and refinanced your mortgage this year. Well, what do you know, the public AOL logs show that “anonymized” user name 123456 happened to do a search for your name, that seedy website, “Barbados hotels” and “refinance mortgage”. Hmm.

Actually, this does not even depend on a person having done a search of their own name. I’ve done Google searches on people I’ve known just out of curiosity. If I had done these searches on AOL, then their names would appear in this published data. If one of those people found their name in this log, then they could easily reconstruct my identity based on the same Barbados and refinancing scenarios.

What were those AOL people thinking??? On the page where they released this file (cutely called AOL Research “Alpha”, apparently a little joke about Google’s beta applications), they were very proud of the fact they had obscured the identities of the searchers and shared this valuable data with the world. It seems like these engineers are narrowly focused on their technical achievement but utterly clueless about how their users (and the real people who are named in the published data) might react. Did the above scenario never occur to them or their managers?

I have read that in Google headquarters, they have a giant flatscreen display in the receptionist area showing office visitors real-time searches that are being done. But that isn’t quite the same thing as AOL releasing an entire set of data like this so thoughtlessly.

Update: it appears that the page on the AOL research site that hosted this file has been taken down. Maybe they can ask people to kindly ignore the files that they downloaded while it was available.

Update: CNET.com has examples of some really disturbing searches that hint at people’s identities. I’m sure CNET does not want to expose too much information for fear of getting sued themselves.

Update: TechCrunch.com, one of the sites that first broke this story, posted a link to a NY Times article with the first person positively identified from the data, some poor lady in Georgia. As noted earlier about the CNET report, I’m certain that the only reason more people haven’t been outed in public is because no blogger wants to end up getting sued. The NY Times got this lady’s permission to use her as an example it seems. But no doubt as this data gets around people will be outed among their circle of acquaintances or co-workers. I would not be surprised if eventually someone committed suicide from being mortified with embarrassment.

There is a segment of the technical world that thinks this is not a big deal in proportion to the credit card fraud and identity theft that occurs on a daily basis. But I suspect that, given a choice, these folks would rather have to go through the hassle of closing stolen credit card accounts, compared to having your name and reputation permanently associated with some of the truly demented stuff found in this data.

Why Comments are Disabled

Parker — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 05:18:39 +0000

Many, if not most, blogs are setup so that visitors can post comments. I’ve decided not to do that on this blog. The reasons for doing this are:

1. I don’t want to have to spend time dealing with comment spam.

2. I read Steve Pavlina’s article about shutting down comments, where he notes that only a small percentage of his readers bother to read comments, and an even smaller percentage ever post a comment. His reasoning that spending time and energy on moderating comments for a relatively small group is not the best use of either his time or energy. I agree, I would much rather see more of his excellent articles than have him deal with unruly commenters.

3. The main reason: it’s kind of embarrassing, but I often get addicted to and caught up in message boards and forums, especially when they don’t have email notifications when responses are posted. It’s taken me a long time to wean myself off of Usenet. I just know that I would get sucked into spending hours getting into stupid arguments with people, just to try to prove that I’m right and that they were idiots. That seems to be part of the Myers-Briggs INTP personality profile.

Finally Settled on WordPress Theme

Parker — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 04:48:42 +0000

After futzing around with the default WordPress theme, trying to get the sidebar to show up on the left-hand side, and trying to work around CSS problems in other themes, I’ve finally found one that is clean and simple, easily customizable and seems built from the ground up to support advertising: Javier Garcia’s MW, Monetizing the Web. There don’t seem to be many good themes available with left-hand sidebars, which is surprising since I would think that would be a better layout for anyone interested in ad revenue.

WordPress on Windows IIS with Pretty Permalinks

Parker — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 02:04:55 +0000

As a Microsoft .NET developer setting up a blog, I’ve used DasBlog and .TEXT (the open source predecessor to Community Server). DasBlog is easy to setup, everything is XML based so there is no database configuration, but it always bothered me that GUIDs were used in permalinks and trackbacks. This made pages get really fugly with GUIDs all over the place. Plus there seemed to be a lack of ongoing support for DasBlog and issues with rendering on Firefox. On the other hand getting .TEXT up and running was incredibly frustrating due to the incomplete and sometimes incorrect documentation available.

Because of my dissatisfaction with both of these .NET blog engines, I decided to give WordPress a try, getting over my irrational resistance to PHP and MySQL. I was a little worried about the fact that I’m using IIS on Windows 2003 Server on a shared hosting service.

I have to say to any Windows-centric person who is reluctant to try installing WordPress: it is simpler than you think and there are only a couple of sticking points that I ran into.

First, there is this great step-by-step animated movie of installing WordPress. This gave me a lot of confidence because it showed that I would not have to deal with a lot of unfamiliar PHP or MySQL.

The only error I ran into was because I had not set index.php as one of the default pages on my IIS site (usually this is index.html or default.aspx). As soon as I added index.php, we were good to go.

Next, I wanted to setup WordPress so that it would use pretty permalinks, instead of using ID numbers in the URL (that’s one of the reason’s I wanted to get away from Das Blog after all). Even though I’ve read that it’s a myth that permalinks need to have keywords in them, pretty permalinks still look a lot friendlier to human readers.

I got stuck at this point because the resources I was finding online indicated that to do this on IIS, I needed to muck around with ISAPI rewriting. I can’t do that in a shared hosting environment, so I was in limbo until I found this link through the WordPress Codex.

It turns out this is all I needed to do to enable pretty permalinks through IIS:

Add these 2 lines to a php.ini file and store that file in your webroot:
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0

That was it! After adding that file to the webroot, then I just selected a custom permalink format through the WordPress configuration screen.

Thanks to the people at http://www.cre8d-design.com/ and http://blog.taragana.com/ for posting such useful stuff!